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STUDIES IN CONDUCT. 



•.401 



^'WcmAytfUitn rffosi&y. ttjco e,*. 



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STUDIES IN CONDUCT. 



SHORT ESSAYS 



FROM THE 'SATURDAY REVIEW.' 



&^1868 









" c LONDON: 
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 

1867. 






J. E. TAYLOR AND CO., PRINTEBS, 
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS. 



NOTE. 

The title which has been given to the following 
collection of Essays does not perhaps describe all of 
them quite accurately. But it indicates, more or less 
exactly, the point of view from which they were all 
written. I can only add, in borrowed words, that 
" If the subjects be slight, the treatise is short. The 
busy may find time, and the idle may find patience." 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

i. The Capacity toe Pleasure 1 

ii. The Pains ot Association 11 

in. Breakdowns 21 

it. Small Hypocrisies . 31 

v. The Leopard and his Spots 41 

VI. People with Nothing in them 52 

vn. Plain-Dealing 61 

viii. Social Troglodytes 71 

ix. Trimmers 82 

x. Short Cuts 92 

xi. Youthful Promise 102 

xii. Crossing Rubicons 112 

xiii. Unfair Advantages 121 

xrv. Diplomacy in Private Life 13] 



viii Contents. 

PAGE 

xv. The Philosophy op Sour Grapes .... 140 

xvi. Intellectual Vigour "152 

xvii. Mental Ripeness 164 

xviii. Favourite Authors 174 

xix. Drawing-room Critics 187 

xx. Sympathy with Nature 196 

xxi. Rural Delights 208 

xxii. Town and Country 218 

xxiii. Imagination and Conduct 228 

xxiv. Colloquial Fallacies 237 

xxv. New Friends 246 

xxvi. Sins against Health 256 

xxvu. Middle-Class Morality 266 

xxviii. Chestereield's Letters to his Son . .... 275 




STUDIES IN CONDUCT. 



THE CAPACITY FOR PLEASURE. 




or more 



j*F the many extraordinary notions which 
constitute the distinctive characteris- 
tics of an average Englishman or 
Scotchman, none is more wonderful 
inveterate than the conviction that all 
pleasure is more or less a waste of time. Even 
educated men, who have shaken off most of the 
unreasonable prejudices which were instilled into 
them by the wise old ladies, with petticoats or 
without, who surrounded their youth, are con- 
stantly found to have retained the* old view about 
pleasure. The most excellent persons of all sorts, 
differing in pretty nearly every other point, and re- 
presenting the most opposite sides of human cha- 



2 Studies in Conduct. 

racter, agree in looking upon pleasure as at most 
a necessary evil, incident to our fallen race. First 
of all, there is the great Immortal- Soul argument, 
occasionally used by religious professors of every 
shade. Is it worthy of an immortal being to dance 
the deux-temps, or play a rubber of whist, or look 
at another immortal being trying to break his neck 
on a trapeze ? Then there are those foes of plea- 
sure who take up the serious line brought into 
fashion in education by Mrs. Hannah More. We 
all remember how that fearful and wonderful per- 
son, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, was disgusted 
with the vapid and frivolous talk of all the young 
ladies he met with, and how the people who mixed 
in society were called "the mingled mass which 
celebrate the orgies of dissipation/' Kacing is 
" a turbulent and unnatural diversion \ " while 
even clubs are "subversive of private virtue and 
domestic happiness." There cannot, Hannah More 
allows, be an amusement more entirely harmless 
in itself than the practice of frequenting public 
walks and gardens on a Sunday. "But," she 
adds, " I must appeal to the honest testimony of 
our own hearts, if the effect be favourable to se- 
riousness ; do we commonly retire from these 
places with the impressions which were made on 
us at church in their full force ? " If she had sur- 
vived to our time, she might, on the same prin- 
ciple, have appealed to the honest testimony of 



The Capacity for Pleasure. 3 

their own hearts, whether young ladies can receive 
in their full force the monitions of the amiable 
curate with whom on the previous afternoon they 
had been engaged in playing croquet. Croquet, 
moreover, innocent as it appears to us, would in 
her opinion have been a monstrous and disorderly 
piece of libertinism. For, of all the wicked vani- 
ties of this world, love of dress is the most wicked, 
and for a lady to show any portion of herself ex- 
cept her face and her hands is to be immodest 
and disgusting. The display of ankles and bal- 
morals incidental to croquet condemns that popular 
pastime, on the old theory,, to the level of the most 
abandoned of their sex. Would it not be a fitter 
employment for serious beings in their hours of 
ease to chat lightly over the backslidings of the 
ancient Jews, or the practices of the primitive 
Church, or to discuss the best means of training 
up righteous lady's-maids and godly hinds ? 

But it may be allowed that the once conclusive 
argument against all enjoyment, that it is inconsis- 
tent with the discharge of religious duties, has fallen 
into considerable disrepute. There are, it is true, 
numerous circles in which any relish for amuse- 
ment is still taken for a symptom of a godless and 
unconverted heart. But these circles are every 
day becoming narrower and narrower, and even 
within the most contracted limits the range of 
allowable recreations is being extended — due care, 

b % 



4 Studies in Conduct. 

of course, being always taken to sanctify them 
with truly pious names and adjuncts. Yet, as one 
set of objections to pleasure loses its hold, others 
spring up to exercise the same influence. Just as 
theologians are giving up the rigid ascetic theory 
of life, the most active worldlings begin to admire 
it.. Just as we have ceased to believe that pleasure 
is fatal to salvation, people start up to persuade us 
that it is fatal to getting on in the world. The 
active worldling is as ready to call every kind of 
amusement by the evil names of frivolity and 
stupid self-indulgence as the converted saint used 
to be. The tremendous making haste to be rich 
leaves neither much time nor much taste for diver- 
sions which do not seem in any way to lead up to 
the main object of life. And anybody whose reso- 
lute devotion to his work has stripped him of all 
personal interest in play always comes to think 
that play is only needful for "little people and for 
fools. " A man who goes down to his mill all the 
year round at six in the morning, and keeps steadily 
at work until six or seven in the evening, when he 
is too tired to do anything except dine and tumble 
into bed, is universally allowed to be leading the 
most admirably rational existence in the world. 
If of these twelve hours he took, say, three, in 
which to read good books, or to study science or 
music or architecture, his friends would shake their 
heads, as over one who had just virtue enough to 



The Capacity j br Pleasure. 5 

make them honestly regret that he should thus 
throw away his chances — chances, that is to say, 
of making fifty thousand pounds instead of resting 
ignobly content with twenty. The modern con- 
demnation of a man who falls away into a little re- 
creation is less severe than that with such people 
were formerly visited. He is not sent to Coventry, 
nor told that he is on the road to ruin in this 
world and to perdition in the next. But he is pretty 
sure to pass for a frivolous dilettante, and to be 
called flashy and conceited. He ranks as a second- 
rate sort of person, who is frittering away energies 
which might have made him a millionaire, in exer- 
cises which will only have the comparatively piti- 
ful effect of making him a man of knowledge, re- 
finement, and taste. 

The coarser pleasures are, fortunately, no longer 
popular among educated people. There are plenty 
of fools left to patronize such of these pleasures 
as the law cannot reach; and casinos, gambling 
tents at Epsom, cock-fights in the country, are 
thronged with people whom a natural or acquired 
temperament effectively protects against the better 
influences of the time. Only among large classes 
of men, and even of women, there is nearly as 
little sympathy with pleasure in its highest sense 
as in its coarsest and lowest. The truly earnest 
are as hostile to pleasure as the truly pious. They 
take up one of two positions, and sometimes both. 



6 Studies in Conduct. 

They either insist that a man should make it his 
first and most urgent business to work hard to 
acquire wealth, or else they say that while there is 
so much misery and wickedness in the world we 
ought to have no heart for mere amusements, and 
the cultivation of finnicking tastes. The first is 
the favourite view of the man of practical energy 
and vulgar ambition. The second satisfies those 
who are too dull and fussy for anything but their 
so-called philanthropy. The people who care 
about nothing very much except growing rich na- 
turally look on anybody who sacrifices this object, 
in order to get some share in the best pleasures 
which the world offers, as a sentimental fool. The 
others consider him horribly wicked and selfish, 
There is an odious complacency in the trick to 
which the relentless drudge is amazingly partial, 
of replying to anybody who talks to him about 
pleasure, that his pleasure is in unceasing work. 
As if unceasing work, passing every solid day in 
the counting-house, reading and answering hun- 
dreds of letters every week, keeping the mind un- 
interruptedly bent on business details and prospects, 
were an exhaustive and unimprovable system of 
life, beyond which the force of nature could not 
go. Only more strange than this is the delusion 
that the claims of relaxation are satisfied by 
spending a month out of the twelve at the sea- 
side or on the Continent. To alternate a long 



The Capacity for Pleasure. 7 

spell of excessive labour with a short spell of 
excessive repose is about as rational as to main- 
tain that a man who takes a bottle of neat brandy 
one clay, and a quart of water the next, has been 
drinking brandy and water. If it be sound doc- 
trine that a line every day is the secret of success 
in art, it is not less true that an instalment of 
pleasure every day is at least one of the secrets of 
happiness in life. As it is, too many people are 
like the one-eyed beast who lived on the shore of 
the sea, and fancied that whatever peril he might 
be exposed to must approach him from the side of 
the water ; but while he kept his eye steadily fixed 
on the sea, he was suddenly devoured by an enemy 
who came stealthily upon him on the side of the 
land. It is the fashion to suppose that men can 
only have their moral nature dulled and debased 
by pleasure. In their affright at pleasure, they 
forget to take any precautions against being dulled 
and debased by excessive labour for a single object, 
which is only a worthy object when it is one of 
many. 

From our school-days upwards we are taught 
first by masters and discipline, and afterwards by 
the temper which we find prevailing in the world 
outside, that if anything is pleasant it is pretty 
sure to prove to be wrong. It is attempted to re- 
present even cricket and foot-ball rather in their 
utilitarian aspects, as good for the body, just as 



8 Studies in Conduct. 

grammar is good for the soul, than as means of 
pleasure and enjoyment. The notion that pleasure 
as pleasure is a desirable thing is repugnant to the 
heart of the commonplace pedagogue. The theo- 
logical idea that mortals are sent here as to a place 
of sore chastisement and mortification, has taken 
deep root. The more dull, difficult, and unintel- 
ligible a Latin grammar, the more suitable it is 
for the use of boys. All the most obviously unin- 
teresting books are on that account the more 
creditable kind of reading. If a lad or a man be 
found poring over Milner's c Church History/ he 
is well thought of, because it is dull and dismal ; 
but if he were laughing over ' Pickwick ' or c Tom 
Jones/ nine people out of ten would declare him, 
in comparison with the disciple of Milner, to be 
wasting his time. That pleasure, amusement, 
mere recreation, thorough unbending, is a legiti- 
mate object of deliberate pursuit, is a truth pretty 
invariably disparaged, just because a man immo- 
derately addicted to self-indulgence is a very bad 
sort of man. People do not seem to suspect that 
it is possible to be just as immoderately and evilly 
addicted to work as to indulgence, and that an 
equal amount, though of a different kind, of mis- 
chief may accrue to one's family from excess in 
one direction as in the other. 

The proposition that all pleasant things are 
right is untrue, but it is certainly not so radically 



The Capacity for Pleasure. 9 

untrue as the more popular proposition that most 
pleasant things are wrong. And the prevalence 
and popularity of the more untrue of these two 
absurdities has an especially mischievous effect. 
Its constant presence, exerting an influence of 
whose operation one is mostly unconscious, checks 
— and, if it be supported by other influences, such 
as a conviction that mirth is unscriptural, actually 
extinguishes — all blitheness and freedom of spirit. 
Why should not a jocund capacity for pleasure and 
enjoyment be as eagerly desired by parents and 
teachers as a capacity for remembering dates or 
names ? It may be said that Nature settles the 
first, and that she only is responsible for it, where- 
as, though she may have to give one the faculty 
of memory in the first instance, it must be de- 
veloped from without afterwards. As if Nature 
could be responsible for the cheerfulness and joy- 
ousness of a creature whom every care is habitually 
taken to depress. 

This is the department in which the moral part 
of education has always been weakest, though vigo- 
rous attempts are occasionally made to strengthen 
it. That people should be trained and encouraged 
to be upright, self-controlling, industrious, and 
magnanimous, is never denied. But there is every 
bit as much reason why the faculty of being jolly, 
of finding an eager pleasure in all sorts of objects 
and pursuits, should be trained and encouraged. 



io Studies in Conduct. 

An hilarious elasticity of nature is surely one of 
the most invaluable qualities anybody can have. 
Yet somehow the man who goes through the world 
with sober solemn jowl is always thought to be 
showing a deeper sense of the worth of life, and 
to be making more of his talents, than the elastic 
man. May we not reasonably wonder why ? 




II. 



THE PAINS OF ASSOCIATION. 




ERO used to curse and shun the scenes 
of his crimes, " because they could not 
change their faces, like the courtiers, 
to flatter him.-" Even people, who 
have not to torment them the recollection of such 
enormities as haunted Nero, may begin, after a 
certain time, to find that places have a stubborn 
unchangeableness about them which they would 
fain avoid. Considering that all of us who are not 
utterly dull and inanimate are constantly under- 
going change, and that, even if our own stock of 
ideas and sentiments should, to our discredit, re- 
main unaltered, yet the mere lapse of time outside 
of ourselves changes our point of view, it is plain 
that the comparative constancy of places is a some- 
thing which jars on the unphilosophic mind. Of 
all the agreeable fancies that have gained room 



12 Studies in Conduct. 

among the stock sentiments of the world, that of 
there being some pleasure in renewing old associa- 
tions with places is the most delusive. The con- 
stant breakdown in the fulfilment of anticipations 
of this sort is as much a commonplace as the anti- 
cipations themselves are. Men who have made a 
mark in the world are often pictured, by novelists 
and the modern fancy biographer, as revisiting the 
scenes of their youth, and moralizing over them 
with a gushing and hateful complacency. The 
truth is that most men who achieve any great suc- 
cess have by that time outgrown the inclination 
" to shed a tear of joy and thankfulness/' as the 
phrase is, over the haunts of the past. During 
the thirty years or so which in most cases, even 
of success, elapse between youthful aspirations and 
their more or less perfect fulfilment, a man's mind 
is better engaged than in sentimental moralizings 
over the vicissitudes of mortal fortune; and when 
he has got time to recognize these vicissitudes and 
ponder over them, he has probably lost the in- 
clination. It is mostly, we believe, sentimental 
young gentlemen and unmarried ladies under 
twenty who expatiate so beautifully upon the 
touching loveliness of early association. Perhaps 
one ought to be very much obliged to them for 
their sedulous efforts to keep us from being har- 
dened by the world, and to recall to grown-up 
people the purity and simple-mindedness of their 



The Pains of Association. 13 

earlier days. But contrasts between present and 
past, be they never so touching, are seldom very 
effective. When they are most violent — and, to 
have any effect at all, they must have a certain vio- 
lence — they are simply acutely painful, and it may 
be questioned whether mere acute pain is ever good 
for much in morals. Supposing a man has the for- 
titude to run probes and lances deep into himself, 
merely for the sake of the pain they inflict, the 
reaction is sure to be too strong for him, and the 
pain and humiliation will most likely leave him 
worse, not better, than he was before. Clergymen 
who preach on behalf of Female Penitentiaries 
nearly always introduce a picture of the fallen 
woman reflecting with softened heart upon the old 
days when she clung about her mother's knees. It 
would be more true to nature and fact to represent 
the woman as hardened, not softened, by such re- 
flections. A good many fallen women do not in- 
dulge in these retrospects at all, and those who do 
are often irresistibly driven by them to the solace 
of gin. It is a wholesome thing that men and wo- 
men should smart for their backslidings, but smart- 
in gs which result in a too profound depression of 
the moral system are the most dangerous discipline 
to which anybody can subject himself or others. 
The sting which is left by a revival of the old 
hopeful associations in the breast of a man whose 
life has been, or appears to himself to be, a failure, 



14 Studies in Conduct. 

more often makes him reckless than stimulates 
him to fresh endeavours. Hence the sight of the 
old school-house, or of the place where he was 
born, or of the church in which he was married, 
is not so much pathetic, as simply horrible to him, 
because it recalls in a vivid way a contrast which 
is pregnant with unalloyed pain. In the case of 
successful men with a warm emotional tempera- 
ment, the places w 7 hich revive old associations — 
that is to say, old hopes and ideas and exploits — 
are not downright odious, as they are to the little 
social Neros. But even here they are not so lovely 
as the young poetesses would have us think. A 
Lord Chancellor or an Archbishop, unless he has 
a very unusual amount of the unctuous affectation 
of dignitaries, is not at all moved to shed a joyful 
tear as he revisits the spot where he remembers 
that he thrashed an ill-conditioned schoolmate, or 
won his first prize, or even preached his first ser- 
mon. The philosopher who is supposed to have 
discovered the doctrine of the universal flux of 
things was himself usually to be found dissolved 
in tears. And one can scarcely wonder at him, 
though perhaps the habitual contemplation of so 
surpassingly dismal a truth might have been ex- 
pected to breed that indifference which comes of 
familiarity with truths as with other things. The 
custodian of a ruin has not a tithe of the sensibi- 
lity which affects the casual tourist; and so a phi- 



The Pains of Association. 15 

losopher who is for ever pointing out the crum- 
bling ruins of human hopes might naturally come 
to look on his doctrine as a matter of business, and 
be no more moved by it than an undertaker or 
a mute is moved by the thought of mortality. 
Agreeable sentimentalists are to be met with who 
get quite hearty and cheerful over the contrasts of 
life, just as a mute does over a lively season. But 
the heartiness, in one case as in the other, is in a 
manner professional. Contrasts and vicissitudes 
constitute the regular stock in trade of a certain 
sort of moralists in poetry and prose. 

Any hint that, after all, this use of violent con- 
trast between a man's positions at different times is 
rather a clever trick than a broad and profitable re- 
flection on life, is resented or despised as an intru- 
sion of a hard matter-of-fact worldliness. People 
who are more sincerely sensible of the sorrowfulness 
of the contrasts which association brings out find the 
old proverbial thought that times change, while we 
are changed with them, by no means so pleasant as 
to be worth making much of. A pair of lovers in 
the honeymoon may find a certain luxury in being 
reminded, by the ruins of the Coliseum, or by hear- 
ing that some acquaintance has come to ruin, that 
man's life is but a span, that he is born to trouble 
as the sparks fly upwards, and that the vicissitudes 
of the world are numberless and full of mystery. 
But, if they honestly realized all this, it would 



J 6 Studies in Conduct. 

strike them as something very different from a 
luxury. And people who talk of the pleasures 
of memory, and the delights of renewing associa- 
tions with the past, are often just as far from a 
real appreciation of what they are discoursing 
about. 

Sufficient notice has not been taken of the mis- 
chief which is wrought in the world by the fear of 
the pain which the rude severance of associations 
is wont to inflict ; in other words, of the harm 
which men receive from suffering old associations 
to gain too tight a hold upon them. In a hundred 
ways, alike in thought and in conduct, the force 
of association restrains and paralyses. Courage 
to obey the dictates of truth or prudence, when 
the memory of former friends or beliefs or habits 
interposes, is one of the rarest virtues. If it is 
true that respect for some past is constantly found 
to be strong enough to keep people back from de- 
cline and retrogression, is it any less true that a 
mistaken tenderness for this same past as often 
keeps back even the better spirits from the vigorous 
advance which they would otherwise have made ? 
Nobody could pretend that such an influence is 
anything but natural. The undeniable fact that it 
is natural makes it all the more dangerous. As 
much civilization is due to the steady repression of 
nature as to its development. Ferocity is very 
natural, but it is no virtue for all that. A reve- 



The Pains of Association. i 7 

rence for old associations is nearly always a sign 
of an affectionate and loveable disposition. It is 
not so quite always, because men who are harsh in 
the present, and irritable to persons before them^ 
are often ready to think of past events, and of 
those at ho figured in them, with a vehement senti- 
mental kindness. A sentimental man of this- sort 
will glow with warm soft feeling as he thinks of 
the fine and sympathetic behaviour of his wife in 
their young days, and within half an hour, straight- 
way forgetting all this, he may rate her savagely 
for some slight or even imaginary neglect at the 
passing moment. But if a keen feeling about old 
associations were a more trustworthy sign than 
it is of a kindly and amiable temper, that would 
be no proof that a systematic concession to such 
feeling is much of a merit. Just as amiability it- 
self may run to seed in a criminal weakness, so 
the particular kind of amiability which consists 
in a sedulous regard for old associations, as for 
things sacred, very frequently leads to maudlin 
indecision or wrongheadedness. Just as it is often 
wrong not to be angry, so it is often wrong not to 
throw old associations to the winds. The author 
of the ' Idyls of the King' has furnished a delicately 
worded illustration of a position of this sort, where 
to yield to the impulses of tender reminiscence 
would be a fatal sacrifice of dignity and self- 
respect : — 

c 



1 8 Studies in Conduct. 

" I hold that man the worst of public foes 
Who for his own or for his children's sake, 
To Save his name from scandal, lets his wife 
Whom he knows false abide and rule the house." 

Of course reminiscence is not the only motive in 
the minds of men who take back dishonoured 
wives. Dislike to exposure, habit, the peace and 
fair name of their children, with a score of other 
considerations, may counsel such a step ; only with 
persons of a sentimental leaning the recollection 
of old days is not the slightest of these considera- 
tions. 

There are other connections, not recognised as 
binding by the law, which in course of years be- 
come in a manner binding on some men, whose 
" honour rooted in dishonour stands," from a hu- 
mane unwillingness to tear up old associations. 
They cannot endure to think of cutting adrift any- 
body to whom time has attached them. As has 
been well said of such connections, " Unless you 
are utterly heartless and worthless, you will find 
that the looser tie is not the lighter. A man 
thinks that he has hung a trinket round his neck, 
and behold, it is a millstone." It may be worth 
noticing that here, as in all other dilemmas in 
which mortals find themselves, a man does well to 
be very sure of himself before he takes any step 
which irretrievably cuts him off from his own past 
history. It is a frightful thing, after a man has 



The Pains of Association. 19 

built a high wall between himself and the past, 
for him to find the spectre of the past glaring im- 
placably at him over the top of the futile defence. 
When we have become alienated from people whom 
we once loved, it is not the scattering of a little dust 
which will suffice to appease the restless shades of 
old associations. Perhaps it is lucky for the ma- 
jority of mankind that they are little sensible of 
these pains, though it is possible that, if they were 
more alive to them, the world would present fewer 
of those harsh and bitter contrasts which seem to 
the sentimental moralist to compose the sum of 
human life. 

A robust nature throws off a too morbid tender- 
ness for reminiscence, because it is able to see 
through the fallacy which very commonly underlies 
the habit of excessive affection for everybody with 
whom we have at any time been intimate. One 
often hears a sort of solemn whimpering over 
what, in such a case, is wrongly called the irony of 
life. ''What a world this must be," says one, 
" when here is a man dragging into public court, 
under circumstances of the deepest ignominy, a 
woman whom only a few years ago he loved pas- 
sionately, and swore and meant to love and cherish 
till death should them part." And, in any case, 
the sight is mournful enough. Only it is to be 
remembered that in reality the man is not dragging 
into court the woman whom he thought he meant 

c 2 



20 Studies in Conduct. 

to love and cherish, but, supposing her to be guilty, 
the mere counterfeit and simulacrum of that wo- 
man. It is the same with all forms of unworthy 
friendship. The lad with whom you used to play, 
who was your closest friend at college, is in rea- 
lity not the same person as the mean knave who 
abuses your friendship in order to play you a 
scurvy trick. His nature and his bodily presence 
may have preserved their identity all the while, 
but, as far as you are concerned, there are in truth 
two people. There is the old friend, and there 
is the new-born knave. The new-comer is no 
friend, and never was. You may justly and pain- 
fully lament that the old friend is dead, but that is 
no reason why old associations should be allowed 
to cluster round the new and degenerate nature, 
to the exclusion of a just recognition of the fact 
that it is new and degenerate. It would be very 
shallow to deny that all estrangements, all ruptures 
with a sweet and pleasant past, have a deeply pa- 
thetic side. That, unhappily, is likely to escape 
no one. This other side is less familiar, and it 
may contain a certain grain of comfort. 




III. 



BREAKDOWNS. 




ijOME contemporary and friend said oi 
Charles Fox, " He lias three passions 
— women, play, and politics; yet he 
never formed a creditable connection 
with a woman in his life; he has squandered all 
his means at the gaming-table; and,, with the ex- 
ception of eleven months, he has invariably been 
in Opposition/'' Unaccountable breakdowns of this 
kind are among the gravest puzzles of men who 
look out philosophically upon society, and like to 
reflect upon the intricacies and contradictions of 
character. The world is full of people who, either 
consciously or without knowing it, have failed; 
that is, have fallen a vast way short of the point 
to which their qualities and their circumstances 
alike seemed certain to raise them, without the 
exertion of a single bit of superhuman or unrea- 



22 Studies in Conduct. 

sonable virtue. In many, perhaps most, cases, the 
cause of the failure lies unmistakeably on the sur- 
face. Very often some habit, strong enough and 
noxious enough to destroy all the qualities which 
tend to success, has been formed in years before 
the man could see either that he possessed these 
qualities, or that the habit which he was allowing 
to get the mastery over him was fatal to them. 
And people who are concerned to vindicate the 
ways of God to man on the small fragments of 
principles by which they usually vindicate the 
ways of man to his neighbour, confess that there 
appears something inscrutably harsh in the ease 
with which a lad or a girl in their teens can, by 
one slip, blight their whole future. 

Besides the cases where the best parts of a man 
are neutralized by a bad habit of his own, a good 
many breakdowns may be accounted for by the 
bad habits of other persons with whom the fallen 
man has the nnhappiness to be connected. Then 
there is a whole stock of habits which, though 
scarcely visible in themselves, are not less pes- 
tilent in their consequences than drunkenness or 
incontinence or systematic idleness. No man can 
know himself who is not conscious of little sub- 
tleties of temper, strange perversities of mood, 
that he perceives but cannot analyse, and queer 
creatures of the mind that at critical moments rise 
out of the dark places of sentiment and turn him 



Breakdowns, 23 

to the right hand or the left away from the con- 
trol of his ordinary reason. The rest of us who 
are watching him, and who think that we have 
long since found out all the springs of his conduct, 
are amazed to find him taking the wrong turn- 
ing with an invincible assurance, and only smiling 
complacently, as one who knows better than his 
neighbours, when he is warned of the abyss which 
awaits him at the end of his wrong turning. It 
is a bitter moment when one first finds out that a 
friend whom the gods will to overthrow has been 
seized with the infatuation which goes before ruin. 
Poor Charles Lamb, whenever his unhappy sister 
showed signs of the approach of one of her mental 
attacks, used to walk along with her to the asy- 
lum, both of them often in tears. A man may feel 
not less wretched when he sees somebody whom he 
has loved walking along beyond the reach of help, 
through sheer wrongheadedness, over the verge of 
the hell of failure. 

But not seldom we are mistaken about a man 
having failed. The fault was our own in expecting 
too much. And these expectations are, in nine 
cases out of ten, the effect of supposing that what 
anybody has a passion for, that he has all the 
capacity for attaining. At the risk of seeming to 
strain after a paradox, it would be nearer the truth 
so say that, in nine cases out of ten, this view re- 
presents the very opposite of what is really the 



24 Studies in Conduct. 

case. With men of ardent impetuous temper, like 
Fox for example, failure is the most effective agent 
for heightening and intensifying the dominant 
passion. They want excitement, and a prolonged 
run of bad luck is one of the most exciting things 
in the world. Moreover, by a law of mind with 
which people are only too familiar, men are noto- 
riously most eager for what they have not got, and 
to a certain extent are not likely to get. Besides 
this, there is all the difference between a strong 
passion and a strong reasonable will. Passion 
overlooks means in its headlong anxiety for ends. 
Hence the weakness of those who occupy them- 
selves too much with thinking how many tho- 
roughly desirable things there are in the world. 
Clutching at all, they get a solid handful of none. 
Men with the best aims constantly break down 
because they cannot bring their great minds so 
low as details and items and little detached bits 
of labour and forethought. If they were to devote 
to detail a tithe of the mental energy which con- 
sumes itself in fruitless pondering upon the ex- 
treme desirableness of the desirable things, they 
would be much more than ten times nearer the 
attainment of their wishes. 

It is a constant puzzle to many persons to as- 
certain what this or that acquaintance does with 
all his money. They know his income, they know 
his general mode and style of life, and they know 



Breakdowns. 2j 

that he has not saved a sixpence. As is sometimes 
said of an unhealthy person's food, his money 
seems to do him no good. The most common 
and the truest answer to this question, why some- 
body who makes a good deal of money and lives 
in a moderate way and yet puts nothing by, is 
that he fritters or muddles his money away. It is 
not gross extravagance, but carelessness and shift- 
lessness, which keeps him floundering in the evil 
waters of neediness. Precisely the same explana- 
tion serves for the fact of so many apparently ca- 
pable men and women never making any way in 
life. Buoying themselves up with resolves for the 
future, they allow the current of present circum- 
stance to carry them drifting down wherever it 
lists. So the future never comes, and the resolves 
never bear fruit of fulfilment. 

In spite of all that misanthropists think and 
say about the grudging malignity of the world, 
there is something astounding in the credit to 
be got from mere resolutions. Unless we have 
some reason for especial scrutiny, we are apt to 
be content, in our neighbours, with an incon- 
vertible currency of fine plans and high-sounding 
designs. A man's promise to perform passes, 
in many respects, with ordinary happy-go-lucky 
folk, for as much as in money matters the Bank 
of England's promise to pay. And with the same 
kind of people there is a very narrow limitation 



26 Studies in Conduct, 

to the sense of the word failure. The} 7 require 
strong evidence and a tremendous depth of ig- 
noble ruin before they will . stigmatize a man's 
career as a failure, a mistake, or a breakdown. 
There is a certain commonplace standard, easy to 
satisfy, beyond which nobody expects us to go. 

To make a certain income and to have a certain 
amount saved up are the first duties which the 
world prescribes to the aspirant after success. No 
man, it is generally considered, who makes a good 
income, can be said to have broken down in life. 
The money test is the first that is applied. And 
as this is one which can be most easily understood 
and most widely grasped, it is unreasonable to de- 
claim too much against its use. A large propor- 
tion of the people around him can understand with 
accuracy nothing else about the poet or the phi- 
losopher except that he makes such and such sums 
by his songs or his ideas. It is a great pity that 
so many persons should be unable to rise to a 
higher level than this ; but, after all, this level is 
fertile in very serviceable though humble virtues 
of its own, and there are levels lower still where 
they have not even reached anything so high as a 
conviction about the merits of solvency. Still 
there are defects about the money test. A man 
may have failed in spite of earning a good income, 
just as he may have greatly succeeded though his 
income may have always stood at a too modest 



Breakdowns. 2 7 

figure. We do not mean that silly picturesque 
platitude that the peasant in his straw-thatched 
hovel may be happier than the mighty monarch 
clad in purple and dwelling in marble halls. This 
is mere nonsense, because the monarch is a great 
deal more likely to get happiness in spite, or per- 
haps by reason, of his responsibilities, than the 
peasant with his mechanical drudgery, dull brain, 
and slow half-brutish sensibilities. Nobody, ex- 
cept in a fit of spleen, pretends to believe that a 
peasant is particularly Jiappy. The man is hap- 
piest who gets most out of himself on every side 
of his character; and if he is hard pinched on his 
back and in his belly, he gets nothing out of him- 
self on any side, except possibly a measure of 
animal fortitude. But without endorsing this 
Tuppery folly about monarchs and peasants, we 
may easily see that, notwithstanding the good in- 
come which satisfies the world at large that he has 
achieved success, the man himself may be per- 
fectly alive to the fact that he has in reality ut- 
terly broken down, and has sold his better self for 
a mess of pottage. In a fiercely money-getting 
age there is much more of this remorse than the 
profane vulgar suppose, or, indeed, are capable of 
supposing. 

Popular applause is another stumbling-block 
which has tripped up men who, but for that, might 
have won a success to be valued in their hearts, 



28 Studies in Conduct. 

instead of one which they have to use hard per- 
suasion to make themselves value. An author 
who sells twenty editions of a worthless book only 
made to catch the groundlings, or a painter who 
makes a fortune out of silly pictures which he 
knows to be silly, or a parson who draws huge con- 
gregations by sermons that are not altogether in- 
sincere and yet are not sincere — each of them no 
doubt, in elated moods, thinks he has not done 
so ill in the world, but then at bottom he knows 
that he has done exceedingly ill for himself. 
Every little stroke of such success is so much 
added to the weight of regret in the undated mo- 
ments. Perhaps in most cases it is the intolerable- 
ness of this weight which drives a man who was 
originally a very small impostor into being even- 
tually a very large and brazen impostor. He is 
like a drunkard who flies to the bottle to drown 
the sense of his own ignominy. He requires a 
dram of the vulgar praise that has undone him, in 
order to make him forget how ignobly he has sold 
himself. So he gets deeper and deeper into the 
slough of claptrap in his books or his paintings or 
his sermons, or in whatever shape it is that he 
presents the world with the adulterated lees of his 
mind. 

Breakdowns in life, whether of that gross and 
palpable sort which all the world can behold, or 
such as are only visible in the light of the man's 



Breakdowns. 29 

own conscience, are all the result of some kind of 
moral wortlilessness. Neither untoward circum- 
stances nor the evil behaviour of others can effect 
the fall of a man with a firmly based character. 
They may make him halt in his journey, and 
stumble and grow weary, and this is bad enough. 
But there is no ruin in it. On the contrary, until 
years have stolen away his sap and vigour, the feel- 
ing of having got well over a nasty place, though 
the reminiscence is too painful to allow him to 
congratulate himself, still inspires him with a so- 
ber confidence and a trustworthy self-respect which 
supports and encourages him in every new venture. 
People break down because they do not take 
pains with their character, as they would with their 
bodies if they were going to fight or to run a race. 
They seldom keep themselves in moral training. 
The consequence is that the first blow from the 
enemy Circumstance, or the first severe spurt in 
the course, leaves them sprawling and breathless. 
The man in fine moral condition gets tremendous 
knocks and bruises like his neighbours, but he is 
soon healed. Nobody, one may suppose, is in per- 
fect condition, but there is a too plain difference 
between those who take habitual pains to preserve 
a healthy balance of character, and those who frit- 
ter away their lives in playing shilly-shally with 
themselves, acting from one set of motives one day 
and from another set the next, first bringing the 



30 Studies in Conduct. 

body under, and then giving way to every appetite, 
to-day ascetics, and Sybarites to-morrow. The old 
Roman proverb ran that nullum numen abesi si sit 
prudentia, and it is the absence of the virtue to 
which they gave the name of prudence that we 
may best express by worthlessness. Lack of fore- 
sight and vigilance, of concentration and self-con- 
trol, of ability to look for remote ends and to dis- 
cern sure means, implies that limpness and flacci- 
dity of character which almost ensures a crash at 
the first obstacle that presents itself. And even if 
there be no crash, there is at best only a feeble 
hobbling along the path, instead of a vigorous and 
stalwart stride. 



IV. 



SMALL HYPOCRISIES. 




HE hollowness of a great deal of our 
social intercourse is a commonplace 
which makes ardent young men very 
angry and eloquent and amusing^ and 
crude- minded older men very sour and shrewish. 
The one declaim and the other sneer because 
people who ask you to dinner, and are very happy 
to have you at their dancing-parties, decline to 
lend you money or to let you marry their daugh- 
ters. The conduct of society is constantly being 
brought back to the first principles, not of society, 
but of a state of nature. The inconsistency is 
plain. The grumblers like balls and rural fetes, 
bat they demand a community of goods, and think 
they have a right to the hand of any woman 
they may covet, such as could only exist in the 
nomadic, or even the fishing and hunting, stage of 



32 Studies in Conduct. 

the progress of the race. They do not see that if 
asking a man to dinner implies an invitation to 
him to help himself to as much money as he re- 
quires, or to take whichever of the daughters of 
the house is most to his fancy, then, as soon as 
this is discovered, the man will not be asked to 
dinner — that is all. If we are to revert to the Be- 
douin and Oriental principle, that it is atrociously 
inhospitable to refuse a guest any favour that 
he may ask, we shall all grow very careful not to 
entertain any but married men with more money 
than they know what to do with. The cramping 
effects which such a revolution would produce upon 
hospitality may be very readily imagined. As it 
is, those who insist that every friend is an impostor 
who does not wear his heart and his purse and his 
daughter's heart and purse upon his sleeve, are 
themselves the worst impostors of all. They pre- 
tend to like a man for the pleasure which his so- 
ciety and that of his friends can give, while all the 
time they are only thinking, not how they can re- 
pay him for this, but how many more material ad- 
vantages they can extract from his good feeling or 
his weakness. It seems very pointed and damn- 
ing to say that the lady who has shaken hands 
with him in her drawing-room with so much cor- 
diality and enthusiasm would be just as cheerful if 
she heard the next day that he had become bank- 
rupt. Why should she not be? Surely one may 



Small Hypocrisies, 33 

be pleased to see an agreeable man, without bind- 
ing our heartstrings round him, or staking our 
peace of mind upon his solvency. Anybody can 
get a cheap reputation as a philosopher by taking 
up the line that such a doctrine as this is the glo- 
rification of selfishness. The insincerity of the 
world is one of those fine windy themes which are 
capable of a very exalted and pleasing treatment. 
They make a weak man or a weak woman feel ever 
so much better and holier. Not that such edifica- 
tion has the smallest effect upon their conduct. 
They would rather esteem it an irreverence to 
bring the windy high-falutin' principles down from 
their sacred places into common use. It is a vast 
comfort to know that they look with proper con- 
tempt upon the hypocrisies of society, that is, of 
their next-door neighbour. The comfort, one sup- 
poses, is much the same as that which warms the 
bosom of the pagan as he thwacks the little wooden 
god that he adores. The hugest blows that can be 
heaped upon the back of an abstraction like so- 
ciety do no harm to the abstraction, and they re- 
lieve, to a delightful extent, the feelings of the man 
who raises his right arm to the task. 

It is much more profitable to observe the preva- 
lence and the consequences of the small hypocrisies 
of the individual than to bewail the vague hypocrisy 
of society as a whole. There may be a great deal of 
use in reflecting on the harm which a man may do 

D 



34 Studies in Conduct. 

himself by the practice of petty deceits upon his 
neighbours. There cannot much good come of 
believing that all mankind are in a friendly conspi- 
racy to cheat one another; but the plot of a man 
to pass himself off for something which he is not, 
and which he has excellent reasons for knowing 
himself not to be, is a piece of conduct that may 
be looked at soberly and practically. We can see 
what this means. But w T hen people say that so- 
ciety is selfish and insincere, w 7 e scarcely have a 
much more accurate idea of what they specifically 
mean than if they said that a locomotive was selfish. 
A whole parcel of small social hypocrisies is 
commonly labelled with the simple name of affec- 
tation. The laudable kinds of insincerity may be 
mostly summed up in the significantly un-English 
name of complaisance. In ordinary speech, com- 
plaisance, even in its worst sense, seldom means 
more than an unselfish hypocrisy. It is the at- 
tempt to be sympathetic with other people, not for 
any 'sinister aim in the background, but merely be- 
cause the man likes to feel things going smoothly, 
and with as little grittiness as possible. Obviously 
this (on the whole) useful and creditable habit may 
become ignoble. The man who is universally com- 
plaisant, and has lost the faculty of saying other 
than smooth words, very soon finds that the world 
has taken the measure of his weakness, although 
perhaps he may deliberately prefer that people 



Small Hypocrisies, ^ 

should think little of him than that they should 
put him to the trouble of arguing and disagreeing 
and quarrelling with them. The very backbone of 
affectation j on the other hand, is an aggressive 
egotism. Nobody is affected who does not want 
to attract admiration to himself, or, if not admira- 
tion, at least that amount of attention which may 
be equally flattering and equally pleasant to a vain 
man. Whether he professes virtues or vices which 
he has not got, his aim is equally to make the by- 
stander or the listener think about him. He will 
submit to anything except being thought like other 
people, or, worse still, not being thought of at all. 
Not confident that the qualities which he has are 
enough to win for him this consideration, he puts 
on the air of all sorts of other qualities which he 
has not got, and which very often nobody would 
value him for if he really had them. Dunning, the 
lawyer, used to spend hours before the mirror pos- 
ing and practising airs which might persuade the 
crowd of impatient attorneys waiting for him that 
his ugly face and figure were very handsome and 
graceful. Nobody cared a straw whether he was 
handsome or ugly. There is no limit to the ab- 
surdity of the guises which vanity will make a man 
ready to put on. 

Oddly enough, foibles and faults and weaknesses 
are the most favourite devices of affected persons. 
They will pretend to be in bad health, when in 

D 2 



36 Studies in Conduct. 

truth they are perfectly well. They will adopt a 
silly lisp, or they will mouth their words, when it 
would be much more convenient to them to speak 
like everybody else. They resort to tricks of gait 
and tricks of gesture, when everybody would be 
much better pleased, and would think far more 
kindly of them, if they walked and comported 
themselves without tricks, and even though the 
tricks are a downright trouble to them. The worst 
of all is that the men and women who are most 
guilty of these follies are constantly found to be 
just those who might most safely trust to their real 
character for esteem and admiration. The affecta- 
tion of clever people has become a proverb. A 
great poet or a great lawyer may be found to di- 
vide the palm of affectation with the emptiest little 
miss in the room. The pleasure which really able 
persons derive from passing themselves off as great 
fools must be one of the most curious in the whole 
repertory of human joys. That a wise man should 
now and again deliberately play the part of a fool 
is not unreasonable. For instance, for convict- 
ing a pragmatical blockhead, and showing the by- 
standers how great a blockhead he is, there is no- 
thing more effective than the Socratic method of 
feigning ignorance and a desire to be persuaded. 
But this may soon be carried too far, and in any 
case is easily distinguishable from the assumption 
of imbecility for the purpose of making people talk 
and wonder about you. 



Small Hypocrisies. 37 

It sometimes happens that what plain folk 
mistake for an absurd and offensive affectation is 
the genuine air and manner of distinction. Clowns 
look on the simplest points of good breeding 
as despicable fopperies. And those who are not 
clowns are often too intolerant of what look like 
insincere mannerisms, but which may be really 
the natural outcome of a strongly marked in- 
dividuality. Provided it be not simply rude 
and ill-timed and selfish and arrogant, such 
distinction gives a fresh and vivid tone to the 
otherwise monotonous and too tame level of ordi- 
nary intercourse. But for one case where it is 
spontaneous and natural, in twenty cases it is the 
artificial product of a restless self-consciousness. 
Half of all the small hypocrisies of all kinds are 
the fruit of the same morbid distrust of ourselves. 
The man who is always wondering about himself, 
what sort of qualities he has, and what is thought 
of him, is sure to feel the necessity of posing, and 
clothing himself in purple patches which may catch 
the eye of the beholder. Even a plain woman, if 
she feels that somebody is looking at her, is apt to 
turn a little theatrical. It is the same with more 
impressive forms of self-consciousness. Nobody 
with his mind fixed wholly and habitually upon 
himself and upon the view which others will take 
of him can help playing a part. Self-consciousness 
instantly makes a man feel that he is in front of 



38 Studies in Conduct. 

the footlights, with paint on his face, and clad in 
a costume which is not that of his everyday life. 

It would be a palpable overstraining of the 
truth to say that hypocrisy, the foible, is as bad 
as hypocrisy, the vice. Affectation, for example, 
is not as bad as cant, because cant is affectation in 
matters in which sincerity and truth are every- 
thing. To pretend to agree and to sympathize 
with people somewhat more than is really the case, 
just for the sake of general peace and quietness, is 
of course not so bad as a gross assentation for the 
sake of substantial personal gain. A certain willing- 
ness to hear opinions patiently and silently, in spite 
of a strong itch to controvert them, is absolutely 
necessary to keep the world from being a sheer bear- 
garden. If this reticence is mistaken for assent 
and sympathy, the silent person is not wholly re- 
sponsible for the blunder. And it is impossible to 
draw an exact line beyond which this implied com- 
plaisance acquires a colour of baseness. A great 
deal depends on the subject, and everything else 
depends on the time and the place and the person. 
Some poor creatures are born for assentation. Dis- 
interested flattery is the attitude which they natu- 
rally assume towards nearly everybody with whom 
they are brought into contact. Of the hypocrisies 
of these miserable souls nothing need be said, ex- 
cept that one may pretty safely conclude that a 
cringer of this stamp has always got some one or 



Sm all Hypocrisies. 

two unlucky and still smaller persons in the back- 
ground whom a mysterious Providence has placed 
in his hands to endure bullying and tyranny from 
him. 

To see the real srnallness of insincerity in trifles, 
of insincere manners, of insincere complaisance, 
and all the other forms of social hypocrisy, one 
has only to put by the side of people who yield to 
such weaknesses those others whom a natural sim- 
plicity, straightforwardness, and at the same time 
sweetness of character, keep from swerving. They 
need no precepts about preserving the volto sciolto 
along with the pensieri stretti — the ingenuous front 
with the reserved mind. An apparently inborn 
straightness of judgment seems to conduct them 
to the nicest, though an involuntary, knowledge of 
the point whence things unworthy have their be- 
ginning. They do not make enemies or disturb 
society. Yet they neither feign to be what they 
are not, nor dissemble what they are. Small hy- 
pocrisies never occur to them as available means 
to any end whatever. The cleverness of the most 
skilful social diplomat has a wonderfully gas-light 
tawdry look when confronted with this vigorous 
native simplicity, which is independent without 
being impudent -or boorish, and fascinating without 
unworthy compliance. For all forms of affectation 
and pretence show a misconception of the relative 
size of things that are worth having. As if self- 



4 o 



Studies in Conduct. 



respect, and the invigorating consciousness of since- 
rity and singlemindedness, were cheaply sacrificed 
for the sake of being thought something that one is 
not by the world ! — that is, by a number of people 
who do not much care whether one is that or any- 
thing else. 





THE LEOPARD AND HIS SPOTS. 




JT is suprising to find how little most 
$Ex$ people understand what is really in- 
volved in a man's character, and how 
imperfectly they appreciate the fact 
that it must always be by far the most important 
thing about him. The proof of this is the tenacity 
with which we see them persisting in the face of 
all experience, in the expectation of a given line 
of conduct from a person whose whole character 
renders such conduct as sheer an impossibility as 
it is for a bramble to produce grapes, or for a 
thistle to bring forth figs. They do not recognize 
that it is character which makes the difference 
between one kind of man and another, or that the 
differences thus established are as generic as those 
between a peony and a violet, between an ass and 
a horse, between a block of granite and a reach of 



42 Studies in Conduct. 

shifting sand. If all this were realized as it de- 
serves to be, some of the kindest and best persons 
in the world would be saved from the pains of the 
most bitter disappointment that can be felt ; and, 
more than this, they would understand better how 
to set to work to procure at least an approxima- 
tion ^to the fulfilment of their hopes. That is to 
say, in the first place, they would not demand more 
from a certain character than it is capable of 
giving ; and, in the second place, having gauged 
its capacity, they would waste no time in fruitless 
efforts to drag it beyond this, but would make all 
their energies tell, by confining them within the 
limits where only they could be effective. To 
insist upon getting from off a certain soil a richer 
kind of crop than it can support, is the surest way 
both to fail in this, and to lose the humbler crop 
which might have been got. 

There is much that is excusable in the motives 
which prompt an indulgence in a delusive shutting 
of the eyes to what character means. It is always 
more or less distasteful to an ardent mind, to find 
itself in presence of insurmountable obstacles to the 
accomplishment of its desires; and it may safely be 
asserted that no obstacles are so hopeless as those 
which the character of a grown-up person opposes. 
There is, at first sight, something downright pre- 
posterous and incredible in the notion that anybody 
can be absolutely and finally incapacitated for dis- 



The Leopard and his Spots. 43 

cerning his or her own good, or, if not for seeing 
it, still for practically pursuing it. It seems as if, 
in a well ordered world, everybody should be able 
to ascend at least whatever moral heights are 
within his view. Yet we see people every day who 
could no more endure the hardships and difficulties 
involved in the practice of this or that virtue than 
Sir John FalstafF could have got to the top of the 
Matterhorn. After a certain time, and in some 
cases from the very beginning, there are feats 
which it is out of the question to perform. Nearly 
any boy of seven or eight years of age might be 
taken and made into a perfect gymnast, for whom no 
exploit of skill that ever has been performed would 
be too difficult to repeat. But a man of five-and- 
thirty, accustomed to live freely and not too regu- 
larly, could never be made, by any amount of 
training and industry and self-denial, agile enough 
to wheel a barrow along a rope ever so many 
score feet above the ground, Metaphors are 
always a little dangerous, but this seems a fair 
illustration of the moral impossibilities which exist 
in the case of a settled character. The excuse for 
ignoring or resolutely denying these moral impos- 
sibilities is that, now and then, somebody whom 
all his friends have considered given up to a repro- 
bate mind, turns over a new leaf, and becomes a 
very prodigy of virtue. In the same way, less 
happily, a man or woman up to a certain point in 



44 Studies in Conduct. 

life does all that piety and social duty demand, 
and then suddenly falls away into shameful 
courses. Cases of this sort, however, do not in 
any way upset the general law that a man can 
only act as his character allows or compels him. 
The only true conclusion to be drawn from sudden 
repentances and sudden backslidings is that we 
should be slow in assuring ourselves that we have 
fathomed all the depths, and acquainted our- 
selves with all the hidden recesses of anybody's 
character. 

It may be asked, can we ever be sure, after any 
amount of experience on this side of the grave, 
that we have got this exhaustive knowledge of the 
character of a single human being ? Do we know 
any one person who does not now and again sur- 
prise us by some caprice, some inconsistency, 
something which, the moment before seeing it, we 
should have declared utterly impossible, and not 
to be thought of? It is true that human nature 
seems to love freaks and paradoxes. And nobody 
with much experience of these vagaries would be 
rash enough to predict with dogmatic confidence 
how his most intimate friend would act in the 
midst of a certain set of outward conditions. 
We may at any moment find that in an unexplored 
corner of his mind lie a whole brood of desires and 
scruples and ideas, which nobody, perhaps not 
even the man himself, had ever suspected. But 



The Leopard and his Spots. 45 

then the point that we are pressing is that they 
were there before, and that it was not the outward 
conditions which begot them. Circumstances 
only act as a magnifying instrument. They show 
qualities, and in the past they have helped to 
generate them; but the man's conduct in any 
particular case is the fruit and outcome of motives 
which were prepared beforehand. When Coleridge 
says that it is the man who makes the motive, and 
not the motive the man, this is what he means. 
If you knew the % man thoroughly, you would also 
know thoroughly to which of two conflicting mo- 
tives in a crisis he will be sure to yield. It is his 
character which gives to the victorious motive the 
preponderating weight, and only in a secondary 
and reflex way that the motive operates on his cha- 
racter. For instance, suppose you see a friend con- 
ceiving the project of marrying, when you know 
that he is spoiling his prospects by such a step. 
You make the consequences of his design clear 
to him, and he still perseveres. Why? Because 
he is of an improvident and inconsiderate charac- 
ter. Because the habit of postponing the future 
to the present, of purchasing a small gratification 
now at the sacrifice of a greater and more enduring 
good to come, has got such mastery over him that 
he is as completely disabled from balancing mo- 
tives as he would be from walking if he had both 
his legs paralysed. He has lost the power of free 



4.6 Studies in Conduct. 

choice whither he will go, and is like a locomotive 
forced to run in whatever direction his second 
nature chooses to set the points. True, it was his 
own fault that he selected a pointsman who always 
turned him on to wrong lines, leading to the va- 
rious halting-places that skirt the road to ruin. 

And this brings us to the gist of the doctrine. 
People foolishly say that, by representing second 
nature as so mighty and irresistible, one is preach- 
ing a kind of fatalism, and teaching men to give 
up the battle with evil habits. But surely a more 
probable effect of pointing out how inexorably a 
man's character rules over him, will be that greater 
wariness and diligence will be exercised in the 
formation of so omnipotent an agency. If he 
knows that the habits which he tolerates or en- 
courages in himself will eventually make it a mat- 
ter of infinite difficulty, or even of plain impossi- 
bility, to act otherwise than as they permit, then 
he is all the more likely to exercise a cautious 
judgment in going under the yoke. Teach him 
that he can dethrone his rulers at a moment's no- 
tice, and he becomes comparatively indifferent to 
the real beneficence or hurtfulness of their sway. 

Perhaps, however, it may seem that, after all, 
the practical tendency of this theory, that the fruit 
is only such as it is the nature of the tree to 
bear, is to make everybody who has got a weak 
character yield to despair, or rather yield without 



The Leopard and his Spots, 47 

resistance to the demands of the formidable 
tyrant whom they have placed over themselves. 
Even if this were so, it would be no reason why 
we should not exert ourselves to deliver others 
from some part at least of the evil which besets 
them. The discovery that a cob-nut tree is not a 
vine is no reason why we should not dung and 
dig about the cob-nut. A man finds, for exam- 
ple, that his wife, whom he took for a very high- 
souled sympathetic woman, proves on nearer ac- 
quaintance to have got a confirmed habit of look- 
ing at things in a narrow, fractious, half-hearted 
way. If he does not grasp the fact that people 
cannot climb higher than their own nature, he will 
probably have the rest of his days made miserable 
by injudicious and overstrained efforts to raise the 
character of his wife to an impossible altitude. 
But if he be a wise man, he knows that he can 
only make the best of what is ; and the conviction 
that he is mated to a creature whom he cannot 
radically alter, and yet whom he has no legal ex- 
cuse for putting away, will not make him kick 
against the pricks. On the contrary, aware that 
the temper which vexes and harasses him is the 
result of an evil growth on one side, and is in a 
manner inevitable, he will both know how in some 
sort to counterbalance the evil by developing the 
other side, and, meanwhile, to take what has be- 
fallen him as lightly as may be. A recognition 



48 Studies in Conduct. 

like this of the truth of the case prevents the fret- 
ful and wearing anger which leads to such a waste 
of the equable enjoyment of life. 

Besides, a just insight into all that depends upon 
character is the strongest incitement to caution, 
either in taking a wife or in forming any other re- 
lation with one's fellows. People often fancy that 
they have got the secret of a character when they 
have only caught a single superficial mood. They 
will not be persuaded that one or two moods,, one 
or two outbursts of a particular humour, are far 
from exhausting the depths of anybody's nature. 
Or else, on the other hand, the experience of the one 
or two moods is thrown away upon them. When 
men and women fall in love with one another, they 
nearly always exhibit this infatuated blindness 
to what disinterested observers can see plainly 
enough. Who has not known a man confess that 
the lady of his love has such and such faults, and 
yet persist that underneath there lies a fine rich 
nature, which only requires a little culture, a little 
removal from unfortunate home influences, and 
so on? Everybody but himself may be able to 
see that the given faults are incompatible with 
any underlying fineness or richness. He himself 
makes the discovery when it is too late. One has 
seen even shrewd and sensible men marry women 
with no more stability or individuality of character 
than one of the india-rubber faces, which school- 



The Leopard and his Spots. 49 

boys amuse themselves by twisting into any shape 
they choose, yet with the persuasion all the time 
that marriage would, in some mysterious way, de- 
velop this lacking force. 

And here is another of the commonest delusions 
in the world. Both with respect to others, and in 
thinking about themselves, people hope that some 
change in outward circumstance will accomplish 
that change of character which, in reality, can only 
be effected either by their own will, or else which 
perhaps cannot be effected at all, because they are 
incapable of willing it strongly enough. A man ad- 
mits that he is indolent, and that his schemes re- 
main unfulfilled, but goes on hoping that when he 
gets into his new house, or has got his books re- 
moved into a quieter room, then his industry will 
forthwith kuow no bounds. Or his life is involved 
in a general tangle; everything is cloudy and in 
disorder. Instead of either setting steadily to work 
to unravel the complications in which he is en- 
meshed, or else of cutting the knot with a meta- 
phorical sword, he trusts, with patient confidence, 
that some change of outward surrounding will put 
everything to rights for him. How many men have 
fancied that going into orders would instantane- 
ously quench all evil desires, and extirpate all evil 
habits, and make the practice of virtue and high- 
mindedness both easy and sure ! Yet men do not 
hope to gather grapes off a bramble by moving it 



50 Studies in Conduct. 

into a vinery. Did one not see such abundant in- 
stances of this mistaken hope, it would appear im- 
possible for men to suppose that a character which 
has been the growth of a large portion of a life,, 
which has been made what it is by the accumula- 
tion of thousands of repeated acts and a mass of 
daily indulged habits, should be revolutionized and 
turned into something quite different by a single 
outward process, such as being married or or- 
dained. There is something essentially pathetic 
in the tenacity with which weak men and weaker 
women cling to the hope that r an anticipated 
change of circumstance will bring them a magical 
accession of moral strength. But the sooner they 
learn that they are hoping in vain, the more likely 
they are to betake themselves to more efficacious 
remedies, provided only they have salt of charac- 
ter and energy enough to be able to profit by the 
discovery. 

Theologians see into the significance of all this 
when they assert the impossibility of conversion 
without the special interference of divine grace. 
It is, perhaps, a reaction from this, as from so 
many other theological dogmas, which accounts 
for the unwillingness of moralists to interpret the 
momentous truth contained in it into the phrases 
of morals. But still the truth is very well worth 
attending to, that it is not mere taking thought 
that will enable a man to add a cubit to his moral, 



The Leopard and his Spots. 51 

anymore than to his physical stature. He is what 
he is made by circumstances, by others, and above 
all by himself. Only a time comes when the pro- 
cess is more or less reversed, and when he is drawn 
along and governed by the character which, in the 
first instance, was in part his own creation. 



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5 



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E 2 



VI. 



PEOPLE WITH NOTHING IN THEM. 




HE tyranny of the clever is admitted 
by everybody, in his own conscience, 
to be among the most oppressive of 
the minor social pests, only it is one 
of those despotisms which make men afraid even 
of whispering their dislike. The severity with 
which the intellectual oligarchs lord it over plain 
folk crushes any effort at rebellion among the 
ranks of gentle dulness and well-meaning stupidity. 
To question their pretensions, to hint that charac- 
ter has other departments besides cleverness, is to 
expose yourself to the hazard of being meanly 
thought of, and numbered among poor creatures. 
With a splendid magnanimity they allow that 
poor creatures are a necessary, if mysterious, ele- 
ment in the general order and system of things, but 
still an element to be kept in a stage of profound 



People with Nothing in Them. 53 

depression, befitting their weak capacities and the 
little they can do for the general weal. Consider- 
ing that the world is mostly composed of persons 
who, in the favourite phrase of their intellectual 
betters, have nothing in them, the only surprising 
thing is that even the existing level of happiness, 
low as it is, can by any means be preserved. That 
things should be able to go on at all, when there 
are so many fools and so few wise men to guide 
them, is a fact so astonishing as only to be ac- 
counted for by a theory that must raise the fools 
very highly in every sensible man's esteem. It 
must be that a person may have nothing in him 
and yet be magically able to bring forth of his 
treasures things new and old. Or else it may 
prove that the quality, which he is charged with 
having no particle of, is not so entirely the root of 
every good thing in life as the fortunate oligarchs 
suppose. As the present is a time when a magical 
is invariably postponed to a rational explanation, 
where a rational explanation is to be had, perhaps 
the more popular theory will be the latter of the 
two we have named — that a person may have little 
cleverness and yet have plenty of other desirable 
things. 

Put in this way, the smartest of coxcombs is 
forced to admit the doctrine. Only, admitting a 
doctrine in general terms is altogether different 
from allowing its application in a special case ; and 



54 Studies in Conduct. 

in special cases the coxcombs who rule too power- 
fully over us make a point of denying that without 
brains anybody can have any qualities that are 
worth mentioning. The consequence is that sim- 
ple men and women are tolerated and patronized 
and snubbed by those who are beneath them in 
every respect, except possibly the power of speech 
and the power of impudence. For, by a grave abuse 
of the truth that a tree is known by its fruits, it is 
sometimes argued that silence is a proof of one's 
having nothing to say. The clever coxcomb will 
not be persuaded that anybody who can speak may 
be careful as to the times and seasons of his speak- 
ing, or, in spite of his ability to speak, may wish 
rather to listen or to think. This is just as true 
as the other opinion created by reaction from the 
first, that a man who never speaks, but appears to 
devote all his energies to thinking, must of neces- 
sity be thoughtful. Hence a silent man is pretty 
sure to be well thought of by one half perhaps of 
those who make it their business to judge their 
neighbours. One half will stigmatize his silence 
as dulness, the other will extol it as the sign of a 
profound meditativeness upon the causes of things. 
But mistakes as to the outward signs of there 
being something within a man are less important 
than the principles on which the nature of this 
most desirable of internal qualities is commonly 
estimated. It is the usage to treat dulness and 



People with Nothing in Them. 55 

inability to appreciate great ideas as an unforgiv- 
able offence, against which it is impossible to be 
too severe. Hence the wholesale contempt with 
which, traditionally and in the mass, a coxcomb is 
wont to regard women. Women, as a rule, are so 
badly educated that they do not furnish to the 
world powerful reason ers, or brilliant discoverers 
of truth, or profound scholars. Therefore, the con- 
clusion runs, they have nothing in them, for the 
capacity of moral patience, the instinctive desire 
to do beneficent works, the diffusiveness of sym- 
pathy, all, of course, count for as good as nothing. 
It is not only the coxcomb who falls into this 
supreme blunder. It is the tendency of even the 
ablest men to suppose that there is no side of 
character of much value bat that on which they 
themselves are strongest. They know how blank 
and dismally empty their own lives would be, 
if robbed of the exercises of thinking and rea- 
soning and balancing, and hence they attribute a 
like blankness and barrenness to every other life 
in which they do not see the same faculties in 
constant and vigorous exercise. Just in the same 
way, anybody who relishes the delights of books 
is apt to think that the less studious mind must 
inevitably be wholly without savour. The truth 
is that, as innate shrewdness and mother wit in 
one case may compensate for lack of book-learning, 
so, in the other, gentleness and delicacy and depth 



j6 Studies in Conduct. 

of moral sympathy more than make up for the 
absence of intellectual acuteness. And even where 
only the blindest partiality could pretend to dis- 
cover anything like this exquisite delicacy of per- 
ception and width of sympathy, there may still be 
a fund of kindly graces and honest good- will. Is 
simple affectionateness of character no recommen- 
dation ? Is it not a weightier quality and a larger 
social influence than any amount of second-rate 
cleverness ? 

The broad course of public transactions is re- 
gulated, or ought to be, almost entirely by con- 
siderations that may not spring from, but are at 
least conformable to, the reasoning side of men. 
But the life of the family and the individual 
receives its choicest elements less from the intel- 
lectual than the moral side, and, except in rare 
cases, from the moral side in its least grandiose 
aspect. Let the coxcomb, or the man who in- 
sists on measuring everything by a narrow intel- 
lectual standard, and everybody by his intellectual 
height and grasp, reflect how much is contributed 
to the stock of happiness by poor kindly old ladies 
and warm-hearted impulsive men who never rea- 
soned a thing out in their lives, and have not even a 
notion how things are reasoned out. Even feather- 
headed sisters and old grey mothers may be worth 
more to a family than the brilliant son who likes 
to deplore that they are not clever and learned, 



People with Nothing in Them. -- 

and have so little in them,, and are so incapable of 
taking interest in intellectual topics. The absence 
of intellectual brilliance is not so much felt in a 
life where good offices and encouraging, sympa- 
thetic words, and graciousness and geniality, can 
diffuse such a glow of tender light over existence. 
Men and women who have nothing in them but 
these excellent qualities are not so very badly off 
after all. It is the mark of a real highmindedness 
to be able to tolerate intellectual commonplace 
when it is accompanied by these minor virtues. 
A man of ordinary thinness of nature, coated over 
by means of a more or less learned training, is 
simply revolted and angry with people who cannot 
argue and will not enter into all the new-fangled 
ideas of the hour. Xo amount of any other 
qualities will reconcile him to this mental defect. 
But the salt of character, with those of richer na- 
ture or wiser culture, is not thought to dwell only 
in intellectual power or in intellectual attainments. 
It is obviously childish to argue that, because 
some people who have got no strength or polish 
from intellectual culture are in every vital respect 
better and greater than many of those who have 
got this polish, therefore intellectual culture is not 
worth taking very much trouble about. Whatever 
graciousness and simplicity of character anybody 
has would have broken into still sweeter and more 
exquisite flower under the enriching influence of 



58 Studies in Conduct. 

letters and trained thought. And, moreover, life 
abounds in slight occasions and small affairs which 
call for the exercise of a certain largeness and 
openness of nature that is never the product of 
anything but culture in the better order of minds. 
There is always a bound to mere graciousness and 
kindliness. No uncultivated person can be tolerant 
and reasonable under every circumstance, and to 
everybody. Prejudice lurks in hidden corners of 
all minds over which knowledge has not shed its 
penetrating light, and prejudice is the natural foe 
of magnanimity. 

It is at this point that kind dull people break 
down even on the grounds of their own virtue. 
Like all dull people, they are the rightful prey of 
prejudice, and they are disposed to buoy them- 
selves up in narrow ungracious courses, where a 
prejudice is concerned, by a justifiable conscious- 
ness of their usual gentleness and kind design. 
Culture would have left them all their natural 
virtue, and it would have had the merit of giving 
room for its free and uncontrolled play. There is 
no certainty and reliance about stupidish persons, 
however well they may behave in an ordinary way. 
Their character conceals a hundred sunken rocks. 
You thought you could be sure of their aid or 
their sympathy in a certain set of circumstances, 
and you suddenly find their faces fixed as flint 
against you. These stony caprices are the kind of 



People with Nothing in Them. 59 

conduct against which culture protects both the 
individual and those who are thrown into contact 
with him. Women, for example, are more capri- 
cious than men, because they are less cultivated. 
And, though often possessing a full-blooded sweet- 
ness of character which is worth a great deal more 
than mere intellectual quickness, they are very 
rarely magnanimous. Magnanimity is not a femi- 
nine virtue, nor, in the minor dealings of life, is it 
a virtue characteristic of anybody of whom it could 
be said with a shadow of meaning that he had 
nothing in him. 

It is plain enough that commonplace people 
who possess no quality to distinguish them from 
their neighbours are bores to all but those of their 
own class and position in the intellectual system. 
There is no character for whom an intelligent 
person can feel so little sympathy or even tolerance, 
if he be of an impatient temper, as one of these 
truly hapless souls incapable of an impulse, unable 
to feel, unable to reason, and filled with a perverse 
and stiff conviction that stereotyped opinions on 
all subjects are the only opinions worth having. 
Where the commonplace character is passive, it is 
more than sufficiently hard to endure. But when 
it assumes aggresssive forms, and attempts the 
contumelious repression of what is not common- 
place, the limits of endurance are passed. It is 
monstrous that people who have really nothing in 



60 Studies in Conduct, 

them except a set of opinions and feelings which 
they have, so to say, just picked up in the streets 
without knowing why or wherefore, should try to 
represent their own flavourless insipid natures as 
the best type and colour of character. Still, it is 
worth noticing that the more common meaning of 
the accusation against a woman, for example, that 
she has nothing in her, is that she is not brilliantly 
clever. The thousand excellences which do not 
come under the head of cleverness are reckoned at 
less than a pin's fee, when it would be nearer the 
truth to say that she has everything in her. 





VII. 



PLAIN-DEALING. 




| VERYBODY knows something of the 
qualities of the great class of Plain- 
dealers. Most of us are personally- 
acquainted with one or two folk who 
pride themselves upon a singular frankness of 
speech, and a disinterested contempt for reserve 
and discretion. It cannot be said that the quali- 
ties of these very remarkable people are of a kind 
to reconcile us to their fundamental principle. In 
the first place, a generous profusion of advice to 
others is mostly accompanied by a ready resent- 
ment of any advice offered to themselves, and this 
offends one's sense of justice. We feel that, if the 
plain-dealer insists on warning his friend against 
this or that defect, he should in turn bear pa- 
tiently, or even embrace gladly, all just monitions 
respecting his own weaknesses. Again, those who 



62 Studies in Conduct. 

deal faithfully with their neighbours, and refuse to 
be misled by the considerations of a feeble com- 
plaisance into shutting their eyes to other people's 
foibles and faults, have a knack of being incurably 
blind to their virtues. They insist upon the im- 
portance of recognising facts ; but, unfortunately, 
under the name of facts, they only include the fol- 
lies and vices, the selfishness and the meannesses, 
of their acquaintance, their false steps and their 
consequent troubles. With the keenest vision for 
a flaw, they have no eye for a perfection. This is 
as great an injustice as its opposite. If we are to 
be warned against any given tendency to evil, we 
ought to be encouraged in any contrary tendency 
to good. If harsh criticism possesses, as is sup- 
posed, some influence which makes its objects bet- 
ter, why should not generous eulogy in proper cir- 
cumstances sustain its objects at a certain pitch of 
goodness ? 

But a plain-dealer of the right stamp, while 
convinced of the inestimable worth of what he 
calls a word in season, is never lucky enough to 
find an occasion when a word of praise or encou- 
ragement would be seasonable. And he is apt 
to entertain very odd notions, even with reference 
to what makes the season when a word might be 
useful. If a man's inability to control his im- 
pulses leads him into straits and shallows, the mo- 
ment commonly chosen by the plain-dealer for his 



Plain-Dealing. 63 

faithful exhortations is that at which the miserable 
victim has just discovered the peril into which his 
bad pilotage has brought him, and is straining every 
nerve to get back into smooth water again. Per- 
haps an impartial third person may suggest that 
probably it is better to help the wretch out of his 
trouble, or at least to leave him in peace to help 
himself out, and then, if necessary, he can be duly 
lectured afterwards. The good Samaritan who 
poured oil upon the man^s wounds was better 
than the Levite who passed indifferently by on 
the other side ; but the Levite is better than one 
who, instead of oil, should pour in vinegar and 
brine. This, however, is entirely repugnant to 
the plain-dealer's views. He declares that there 
is nothing like striking while the iron is hot. If 
you point out his faults to a man precisely when 
he is suffering from them most severely, he is the 
better able to realize your meaning, and to admit 
the justice of your friendly reproaches. They then 
have a pointedness, a beautiful nicety of applica- 
tion, an impressive weightiness, which it is impos- 
sible to shirk. All this sounds very cogent, but a 
pretty obvious blunder underlies it — the blunder, 
namely, of supposing that lecturings and exhorta- 
tions can somehow teach a lesson which cannot 
be taught effectively by actual suffering and the 
visible turns of circumstance. As if a man who 
would not be convinced of his weakness by the 



64 Studies in Conduct. 

failures and vexations which it has brought upon 
him would at once yield to the persuasions of a 
plain- dealing friend, and as if what events could 
not do might be brought about by talk. This is 
so dead in the face of all ordinary tendencies of 
human nature, that there must be some rather 
strong feeling which supports the plain-dealers of 
the world in their unseasonable courses. 

In fact, there are at least two sentiments at 
work, quite apart from the mere impertinence and 
conceit which prompt to intrusive speech and un- 
asked counsel in another person's affairs. First, 
it is extremely disagreeable and vexatious to admit 
that there are people given up to a sort of repro- 
bate mind. Tt seems outrageous that anybody 
should be smitten with a desperate blindness and 
incapacity of managing his life aright. The mo- 
dern temper forbids us to bow to fate or fortune. 
We would fain conceal from ourselves the rather 
humiliating truth that practically there is a force 
in the disposition of a man, and in the circum- 
stances that surround him, which comes to much 
the same thing for his friends and neighbours, if 
not for himself, as if he were fast bound by an iron 
destiny. The plain- dealer thinks still that the 
friends should not spare their remonstrance, and 
he asks you whether, if you see a man walking 
heedlessly to the edge of a precipice, you are not 
to pluck him back. But talk about striking iron 



Plain- Dealing. 65 

while it is hot. or plucking people from the edges 
of precipices, clouds the real matter, as metaphors 
are wont to do. What looks like falling sheer 
over into ruin and degradation is more probably 
a gradual and inevitably subsiding down to the 
level for which all the man's temper and habits 
and surroundings, from his youth upwards, have 
been combining to fit him. To urge upon him the 
imminence of degradation or misfortune is a task 
of dismal supererogation in the case of one who 
has been bringing himself, step by step, to look 
upon misfortune as something beyond control, and 
to think of degradation as a mere phrase, invented 
by the lucky to bring out more fully their own su- 
periority. 

Of course, there are occasional misdemeanours 
which are almost of the nature of accidents ; but 
where one observes systematic misconduct or folly, 
it is fair to conclude that it springs from funda- 
mental principles, or else lack of principles; and 
in either case a word in season is little more 
potent than the mop contending against the At- 
lantic. The philosophy of the homely saying, that 
as such a one has made his own bed he must 
be content to lie in it, is a good deal wider and 
deeper than it is always pleasant to think. It is 
difficult to admit that character and conduct and 
their consequences are all inextricably linked to- 
gether; that they present an inexorable front 

F 



66 Studies in Conduct. 

against which the good wishes of others are ab- 
solutely powerless ; and that what a man sows that 
shall he surely reap also. The plain-dealers are 
not the only class who kick against the pricks. 

But besides refusing to realize that there is 
something which, for all but the man himself, 
stands in the place of fate, they sustain themselves 
in their inopportune counsellings by the argument 
that the substance of them is true. Such and such 
a thing, they say, is so, and therefore it behoves 
us to force it on the attention of him whom it 
concerns. Perhaps there is no doctrine in the 
world which has produced, or at least has been 
used to countenance, so much mischievous folly 
and impertinence as this. The profoundly wise 
saying that all things are lawful, but not all things 
are expedient, is somehow distorted into the vi- 
cious principle that nothing which is lawful is not 
also expedient. In the wide field of history, of 
politics, of administration, of religious belief, the 
consequences of such a misconception have been 
abundantly disastrous. And in the less elevated 
' region of private and social life the blunder is just 
as injurious. A man has made an undoubted 
fool of himself; therefore you have a right to 
let him know that you think so. Therefore, as 
on this theory there is no distinction between a 
right and a duty, you are bound to exercise your 
right. The conscience must be relieved. Every 



Plain-Dealing. 67 

man must hold himself in readiness at any mo- 
ment to mount the pulpit and discourse to his 
erring neighbour; for truth may be unpalatable, 
but it can never be unwholesome. Here, again, 
the plain-dealer entrenches himself behind a falla- 
cious metaphor. And besides, if there be any 
foundation for a comparison between unpleasant 
truths and doses of medicine, is there to be no 
judgment in the times and seasons of administer- 
ing them ? Are we to be for ever indiscriminately 
physicking our friends, just because we happen to 
have a few spare drugs on hand ? The simples 
which, on general grounds, would seem most suit- 
able are constantly found to disagree in particular 
cases. And anybody must have had a peculiarly 
narrow range of experience in life, or else be re- 
solutely deaf to its teaching, who insists that one 
can only make a man better by demonstrating to 
him that he is acting like a great fool or a great 
rascal. 

There are a few people in the world, it may be 
conceded, who relish unpalatable truths. They 
have a sort of itch for being criticized, provided 
always that things do not get too earnest, and that 
the quick is not touched. They really like to have 
their faults pointed out by their close acquaint- 
ance. Young men of a certain stamp are especially 
willing to undergo such friendly dissection. But 
this is found pretty generally in connection with a 

F 2 



68 Studies in Conduct. 

Mutual Admiration Society. Bits of blame serve 
to give a piquant flavour to the huge messes of 
eulogy and compliment which form the staple of 
the intercourse. A taste for having one's faults 
delicately and gracefully handled is, after all, only 
a very subtle or a very morbid form of egotism. 
The thorough-going egotist would rather have his 
weaknesses talked about than not be talked about 
at all. After a prolonged debate upon his merits, 
a slight digression into the subdued twilight of his 
faults makes a pleasant change, and it is a mistake 
to suppose that an ostentatious anxiety to be told 
of faults involves a corresponding resolution to 
amend them. People who really value advice, and 
honestly mean to give it a fair hearing, are chary 
in seeking what may involve an unpleasant obli- 
gation. 

It is hard to decide whether insincere complai- 
sance or unseasonable plain-dealing is the more to 
be objected to. Just as some people insist on giv- 
ing their opinions whether you want them or not, 
so there are others who, convinced that you do not 
honestly care for what they think, nor intend to be 
guided by what they say, have no further concern 
than to resort, in every case alike, to hackneyed 
words and glozing speeches. The man will pursue 
his own course, they say, in spite of counsel, and 
therefore one may as well be pleasant as the op- 
posite. The plain-dealer has at all events this ad- 



Plain-Dealing. 69 

vantage over the unscrupulously complaisant, that 
his theory sounds a great deal finer and more ele- 
vated. The complaisant man can scarcely have 
very much respect for himself if he acts up to his 
doctrine, even though pretty well assured that 
a fool or a rascal will be less confirmed in his evil 
course by insincere and over-courteous compli- 
ance, which he can probably see through, than 
by reaction from the rigidity and brusqueness of 
the plain-dealer, which he bitterly detests. No- 
body can keep his self-respect who holds a theory 
that is not decently presentable, though it may 
happen that the presentable theory, taken with all 
the numerous modifications required by circum- 
stances, comes in practice to nearly the same 
thing as its ostensible opposite. It is better to 
hold a good theory, with occasional deflections, 
than a bad and cynical one, up to which we can al- 
ways act in its integrity. 

Still there is a course which lies at equal dis- 
tances from both the objectionable doctrines. It 
is not necessary to be always telling your friend 
either obliging lies or disobliging truths. This 
might seem so obvious as not to be worth writing 
down, only the popularity of non-intervention in 
contemporary politics is apt to lead to the spread 
of a corresponding view in private relations. The 
moral influence of political doctrine upon social 
doctrine is always very important; and the notion 



70 Studies in Conduct. 

that you ought to see your neighbour march off to 
perdition, if he chooses, without an effort to keep 
him back, is sure to find favour in an age when so 
many spurious forms of laisser -alter obtain credit 
in the wider sphere of public affairs. Then, of 
course, in people of impetuous temper, this breeds 
an energetic reaction, and we are overwhelmed 
with torrents of plain-dealing and universal coun- 
selling. 




VIII. 



SOCIAL TROGLODYTES. 




OME ancient writers have left us ac- 
counts of a curious race of people to 
whom they gave the name of Troglo- 
dytes. These strange beings had no 
houses, but lived in holes which they dug in the 
ground. They had no words with which to ex- 
press such ideas as they may have possessed, but 
resorted to uncouth and inarticulate sounds. At 
the sight of a stranger they escaped swiftly into 
their holes, while even with one another they held 
but little intercourse. Various other particulars 
are recorded of their habits, all forming a most 
astonishing picture of what human nature can 
come to, or rather of what it could ascend from. 
Yet, after all, the lowest stages of civilization at 
different epochs are, as a rule, wonderfully like 
one another. Circumstances change and external 



72 Studies in Conduct. 

conditions alter, but an ingenious inquirer has no 
difficulty in tracing a substantial resemblance at 
bottom between the barbarousness of different 
periods. Even the most polished age is sure to 
contain a class of people in a stage of comparative 
barbarism. It would not be in any way surprising, 
therefore, if we should find that, after the lapse of 
so many hundreds of years, there are still those 
among us whom it is impossible not to recognise 
as the representatives of the ancient Troglodytes. 
This, indeed, proves to be the case, The Troglo- 
dyte is still among us, and we may still ponder, 
with as much interest as was felt by the old geo- 
graphers, the habits and manners and feelings of 
this most extraordinary and entertaining creature. 
True, he no longer digs a hole in the earth to live 
in, and he conforms so far to the ways of his fel- 
lows as to use articulate words. We could not 
expect, however, to find minute resemblances in 
detail. It is enough to discover a similarity in 
main features. For, though the modern Troglo- 
dyte does not live in a hole, he is in one sense as 
remote from the haunts of mankind as if he were 
sojourning in the very bowels of the earth. He 
lives fenced round with an atmosphere, and that 
the very reverse of luminous, of dense moral isola- 
tion. What to others are the pleasures of social 
existence to him are its pains. What interests the 
more civilized portion of his contemporaries only 



Social Troglodytes. 73 

serves to bore him ■ and this, not because he is a 
philosopher who views human desires and interests 
with indifference or contempt, or because he is a 
Puritan who views them with pious horror, or be- 
cause he is absorbed in important business and 
cannot spare time for diversion, but simply because 
he is a Troglodyte. That is, his whole mental 
organization is low. His mind is pitched too 
flat. His interests and pleasures and pains are 
all duller and blunter than those of other people. 
He goes through the world in a sort of eyeless, 
disembodied fashion. Life is like a pale and 
blurred picture in his A T ision, or like a tiresome 
joke of which he cannot for the soul of him see 
the point, or like a stage-play with all the charac- 
ters talking a language of which he understands 
no more than the auxiliary verbs. Of course, just 
as his ancient prototype could scratch up out of 
the earth the roots on which he lived, so the Tro- 
glodyte of to-day is at no loss how to make his 
subsistence. This scratching for roots is the single 
point of sympathy between himself and the outside 
world. It is the one human and social interest in 
which he feels any concern, and even in this he is 
incapable of zeal. 

It is proper to distinguish the spirit of the 
genuine Troglodyte from mere shyness of manner. 
He is by no means necessarily one of those awk- 
ward people whom one may sometimes see in so- 



74 Studies in Conduct, 

ciety, shrinking under the general gaze, expressing 
the discomfort of their minds in the attitude of 
their bodies, and occasionally gaining confidence 
for a moment only to be plunged the moment after 
so much the deeper into despondency and terror. 
Nor is reserve, any more than bashfulness, the 
mark of the Troglodyte. Reserve implies in some 
measure the existence of vigorous qualities in the 
background. The Troglodyte never conceals, nor 
indeed affects to conceal, that he has none of these 
vigorous qualities, and that he has barely a notion 
either of their use to the world, or of the pleasure 
they confer upon anybody who is so fortunate as to 
possess them. The lethargy which hangs over his 
mind effectually unnerves him for even the appre- 
ciation of a vigour which only wearies and per- 
plexes him. 

As might be expected, the Troglodyte is more 
frequently to be found in the provinces than in 
the metropolis. In old country towns one is 
perpetually encountering whole colonies of them, 
distinctly organized upon Troglodytic principles. 
These little communities eat and drink, and marry 
and are given in marriage, very much to all ap- 
pearance like their neighbours. It is not until you 
have mixed among them, and listened to their 
habitual talk, and collected their governing ideas, 
that their characteristic peculiarities are visible. 
An endeavour to introduce any of the subjects en- 



Social Troglodytes. 75 

gaging the most active minds of the day, or to dis- 
cuss passing events as if they were actually taking 
place, meets with a chilling reception that might 
convince the most audacious that he is vainly try- 
ing to drag his companions into a region that is at 
once mysterious and hateful to them. They do 
not understand what he wants them to talk about, 
and they have not the faintest desire to understand 
it, but only wonder darkly, and almost malignantly, 
how any living being comes to worry himself about 
such things. What have they done that anybody 
should expect them either to know anything, or to 
feel any interest, about the results of the American 
war, or the coming Reform Bill, or Jamaica? 
Why should they be disturbed about theological 
or literary controversies ? Even if they knew of 
the existence of such controversies, they would 
look with consuming envy upon the snug lives led 
by the Troglodytes of old time. Nobody came to 
bore them about the Peloponnesian war, or about 
the conflicts of rival sophists. They ate their roots, 
and burrowed in their holes, in unvexed content- 
ment. But, alas, the golden age has passed for 
Troglodytes, as for all the world. They may, in- 
deed, themselves abstain from "taking interest ; ' 
and having " views/' but they cannot, at the ap- 
proach of pertinacious intruders who insist upon 
interest and views, retreat into inexpugnable caves 
and holes of the earth. Even the dullest of coun- 



j6 Studies in Conduct. 

try towns is now and again enlivened and plagued 
by the advent of some chatterer who thinks that 
whatever concerns humanity concerns him too. 
As if it would make any difference to them whether 
the Federals beat the Confederates or not, whether 
Governor Eyre was right or wrong, whether spe- 
cies have their origin in natural selection or in dis- 
tinct acts of creation ! The wise Troglodyte of the 
ancients did not care whether the Greeks beat 
back the Persians, or the Persians overcame the 
Greeks. His hole was as safe, and his supply of 
roots as certain, in one case as the other. And so, 
in modern times, the Troglodyte of the country 
town can make pretty sure of his dinner and his 
old port and his rubber, whether the borough fran- 
chise is lowered or not. Supposing he were to 
take the trouble of devoting to political or social 
study the time which, as it is, he consumes in the 
stolid and lethargic contemplation of things in 
general, he cannot see how either society or his 
own comfort would be benefited. The world would 
go on much as it does now, and he is incapable of 
guessing where there is any room for improvement, 
as far as he himself is concerned. 

If a philosopher wishes to see this lethargic tem- 
per in its most intense and perfect form, he must 
study the female Troglodyte. The man, as we 
have said, is at least brought in contact with the 
interests of his kind in the business of bread-win- 



Social Troglodytes, 77 

ning ; but the wife of his bosom and the partner 
of his dull joys is not reminded even in this way 
that she is a member of a complex and active so- 
ciety, and that there is a momentous and constant 
conflict of opinions and interests and ideas going 
on around her. There is something appalling in 
the sublime stupor, the death -like apathy, of wo- 
men of this stamp about everything that goes on 
outside their own doors. The most exciting and 
important political debate rages about them, while 
they are lapped in the calmest unconsciousness. 
Or, if they are conscious, it is only as the u cold, 
silly female fool" mentioned by De Tocqueville 
was conscious, who complained that whenever 
Napoleon Bonaparte came to her house she had 
to leave the room, because he was "for ever talk- 
ing his tiresome politics." The most interesting 
discovery in science may take place without even 
their having heard so much as whether there be 
any science or not. To literature and thought 
they maintain an attitude of positively stupendous 
indifference, as well the cause as the effect of an 
even more stupendous ignorance. 

The most perfect type of Troglodytish women 
does not care even for theology or religion. But 
few among them attain to this lofty pitch of apa- 
thy. In an ordinary way, the single field, outside 
of the domestic cave, in which they permit them- 
selves to disport their embryonic intellects, is a 



78 Studies in Conduct. 

little spot which they call their religion. Here 
they display a sort of alacrity "which is more unbe- 
coming than any amount of apathy. Here they 
are possessed by a sour, narrow, thin energy,, which 
is all the more astonishing and disagreeable be- 
cause we know that they have no reason for the 
faith that is in them, no benevolent or honest wish 
that truth should prevail, no sincere interest in the 
welfare of those whom they revile. It is simply 
the effervescence of those acrid and unwholesome 
mental humours that are bred by their mode of 
life. If a woman is to be a Troglodyte, she is 
pleasanter to her neighbours if she follows the 
ways of her tribe to the very end. and. excluding 
everything alike from her attention, never wanders 
out of the dim light of her own cave. For there 
is something of spite in the composition of the 
creature. And. this is no more than was the case 
with the tribe whom they so much resemble. This 
people, the old writers say, used to tie a corpse 
neck and heels together, and having hung it up, 
would proceed to pelt it with stones, amid loud 
roars of laughter. The grotesque ferocity of such 
proceedings gives one a capital notion of the nature 
of those few social pastimes in which the modern 
Troglodyte, more especially of the gentler sex, oc- 
casionally loves to indulge. TvTien they do assem- 
ble and unite with other people, it is nearly always 
for pelting purposes. To tie up somebody who has 



Social Troglodytes. 79 

done something which, so far as they can under- 
stand, they do not like, and then to throw stones, 
amid laughs and showery titterings, at the wretched 
victim — this is the best fun they know. An here- 
tical parson, or a woman who has found her way 
or been dragged into the Divorce Court, is equally 
good game. The scent of it brings them all rush- 
ing out of their holes with all manner of uncouth 
chucklings and mumblings ; for most Troglodytes 
are social enough to be quite ready to wash their 
neighbours dirty linen in public at a moments 
notice. They are loath to let the dead bury their 
dead, to leave the heretic to deal with his own un- 
derstanding, and the unfaithful wife to the misery 
which has befallen her. The rites and ordinances 
of the tribe have not been truly complied with 
until there has been a hoisting and pelting. 

This unkindly knack throws some light upon 
the essential evil of the Troglodyte system of life. 
To be utterly devoid of interest in great transac- 
tions or ideas is to keep a house swept and gar- 
nished for the reception and entertainment of as 
many unclean spirits as choose to come in. Men 
and women who are unsocial on principle, who flee 
timidly and shyly into the cavernous obscurity p* 
their holes whenever anybody approaches them 
with a question about their opinions on any matter 
of large import, who shirk public duties, and don't 
care for the public advantage, are pretty sure to 



80 Studies in Conduct. 

possess a taste, that constantly grows stronger, for 
petty scandals and gossipings, and for vexatious 
social persecutions. Quiet towns and pleasant vil- 
lages seem to be mostly inhabited by people who 
are emphatically unsocial, and yet the conversation 
is mostly on trumpery items of scandal and dull 
personal news. To a bystander who is not of the 
tribe the process is stupid beyond description, but 
no donbt it would have seemed dull to an en- 
lightened Greek to watch the Troglodytes pelt the 
carcase of a dead friend. Even this positive evil 
is a great deal less material and less lamentable 
than the absence of all those pleasures and refine- 
ments which belong to a thoroughly active and 
social mind, having a keen concern in everything 
that is going on under the sun. A man without 
arms and legs, and deaf and dumb, would not lose 
more that is worth hearing than is lost by one of 
these apathetic beings, whose minds never by any 
chance stray out of a certain dull and straitened 
path. 

It is only in accordance with the inexorable con- 
ditions of our life, that in all cases the keenest in- 
terest is centred in what may seem narrow, small, 
&nd personal concerns. The greater part of most 
businesses in which men are engaged, and of the 
domestic arrangements which it is, or is tradi- 
tionally supposed to be, the business of women to 
superintend, is mechanical, and, transcendentally 



Social Troglodytes. 81 

viewed, even sordid. In the actual details of daily 
life it is impossible to avoid a great deal which 
is neither elevating nor beautiful, but in itself 
quite paltry and unedifying. It is perhaps a mis- 
fortune that we cannot live a pure and angelic kind 
of life, and enjoy an existence as bright and simple 
as that of Adam and Eve before the Fall. But as 
destiny does not permit a return to the ways of the 
golden age, we may at least find our account in 
doing whatever we can, by cultivating a habit of 
taking vivid interest in all that is passing in the 
world in practical exploit and speculation and art, 
to give existence an air of dignity and size and 
grandeur. Instead of this, the Troglodyte does 
his best to confine the functions of life to burrow- 
ing and scratching for roots, with an occasional 
pelting match for diversion. 





IX. 



TRIMMERS. 




FRENCH newspaper, describing the 
villa of a retired Minister at Nice, 
informs us that in one of the rooms 
the visitor may see a bust of Napo- 
leon I., presented by the great Emperor himself to 
the Minister's father. On the other side of the 
room is a bust of Louis Philippe, presented by the 
Citizen King. On the table is a richly bound 
copy of the c History of Csesar/ the gift of the 
Imperial author. The genius for friendship, im- 
plied in being the recipient of such compliments 
from such widely different quarters, may be looked 
at in two ways, according to one's habitual tem- 
perament. People of this kind, who always con- 
trive to keep in with everybody, or at least never 
fall into the mistake of quarrelling with the wrong 
person, are so common, even in those parts of 



Trimmers. 83 

society on which the personal favour of emperors 
and kings is not wont to shine, that most of us 
who think about conduct at all have a theory upon 
this universal complaisance. By some it is ad- 
mired, as being the only temper which can secure 
to a man serenity of mind ; and without serenity 
of mind, they say, he cannot make the best of his 
life. To others it is hateful, as being the sign 
either of an unworthy servility to what is bad, or 
else of a very shameful coolness as to the differ- 
ence between what is bad and what is good. The 
one set of critics declare that a man is inexcusable 
who goes about passing judgment on his neigh- 
bours, and, so far as he can, executing his own 
decree. The others insist that you are bound to 
measure all conduct that comes under your obser- 
vation by a just standard, and if it be found 
wanting in integrity, or in any of those other ele- 
mentary qualities which are the salt of character, 
that it is a base thing to temporize and to make 
no sign of your opinion. It depends, therefore, 
on the view we are accustomed to take of the 
general question of compromise, whether we think 
it a mark of cleverness and wisdom, or of cunning 
and selfishness, to have in your room at the same 
time a present from Louis Philippe and a present 
from the ruler who is supposed to be the chief 
means of keeping Louis Philippe's children in 
exile. In our own country, so far as public ques- 

g 2 



84 Studies in Conduct, 

tions are concerned, politics do not commonly 
place us in positions where we must either com- 
promise or suffer. We are not called upon, like 
the Jacobite, to choose between the adroit com- 
promise of toasting the Sovereign by passing the 
glass over the water -jug, and the pain of being 
sent to the Tower. If anybody, at Birmingham 
or elsewhere, should prefer drinking prospectively 
to the future President of the British Republic, 
the policeman at the door would only wonder what 
was the joke. The worst penalty of holding ex- 
treme political views at the present day consists in 
being looked upon as a fool by all the rest of the 
world ; and this is a penalty which, from the very 
fact that he is capable of holding an extreme view, 
the man is not likely to feel at all troublesome. 
In theological matters there is a better opportu- 
nity for anybody with a taste for being a martyr. 
Here there are plenty of people, on both sides, 
always busied in efforts to crush the spirit of com- 
promise. Those who believe most and those who 
believe least are equally urgent that there should 
be no wearing of masks, no crafty running with 
the hare and hunting with the hounds. A fanatical 
Legitimist would not think more meanly of a man 
who could have presents from the Napoleons as 
well as presents from the Orleanist princes, than a 
thoroughgoing English theologian on either side 
would think of the compromising Gallio who would 



Trimmers. 85 

dine with an archbishop one day, and have half-a- 
dozen Essayists and Reviewers to breakfast the 
next morning. 

It cannot be denied, however, that, on the whole, 
the temper of the age is all against martyrs. 
Most people zealously follow Polonius's injunction 
to Laertes : — 

" Give every man thine ear, bnt few thy voice ; 
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." 

Not to commit himself is the sum and substance 
of a modern father's advice to a son who has his 
way to make in the world. The more busts and 
presentation copies he can. secure, the wiser will he 
be. He is persistently cautioned against any rash 
and mistimed self-assertion which might involve 
him in the same kind of chagrin which overtook 
the unfortunate lady whose pathetic story is told 
by Chamfort. The Abbe de Fleury was passion- 
ately enamoured of her. Instead of prudently 
temporizing with her admirer, she treated him 
with the most overwhelming disdain. He became 
the great Minister, and it happened on one occa- 
sion that she wanted an important favour from 
him. He reminded her of her former rigour. 
"Ah, monseigneur" she most reasonably demanded, 
" qui Vaurait pu prevoir ?" This defect of fore- 
sight is what should never occur in a thoroughly 
well-regulated mind, and the greatest care is now 
taken to instil the lesson, which is perhaps less 



86 Studies in Conduct. 

disreputable in substance than in sound, never on 
any account to offend anybody who may, under 
any possible set of circumstances, be useful to you. 
And, as a man with a vigorous imagination can 
scarcely meet with a single person who might not 
in some extraordinary conjuncture do him a service, 
this injunction is naturally expanded into the broad 
lesson that you should be always on the alert not 
to offend or annoy anybody in the world. The 
worst calamity that a person of this stamp is ca- 
pable of conceiving is the mortification of know- 
ing that he has unconsciously incurred anybody's 
displeasure, no matter how mean and unworthy 
and generally despicable the displeased creature 
may be. This mortification is not necessarily the 
result of an apprehension that he may possibly 
have lost some substantial good from the man, 
along with his mere approbation or intimacy. An 
ever-present fear of saying or doing something 
which somebody may not like, a timorous dislike 
of having an unfavourable word said of one, grows 
upon those who yield to it, without any reference 
to selfish feelings about material loss or gain. 

It is clear that neither this, nor anything like 
this, deference and unlimited conciliatoriness be- 
longs to the highest type of character. A man 
who is for ever protesting against this or that, who 
cannot let any trifle pass without deliberately 
registering his disapproval, is doubtless a nuisance, 



Trimmers. 87 

and what he affects to consider the courageous ex- 
pression of an unpopular view is in truth the os- 
tentatious airing of his own vanity and conceit. 
The habit of systematically despising all your 
neighbours, and of continually quarrelling with 
whatever they do and think, is fully as objection- 
able as a habit of mentally bowing and scraping 
before them. But it is probably not so bad for 
the man himself. A jealousy about taking the 
course which others have recommended, or which 
he knows that they would be likely to recommend, 
is horribly un amiable, and it is very tormenting 
both to the person who is actuated by it and to all 
with whom he has to hold intercourse. Still a 
cross-grained disposition such as this is not at all 
incompatible with energy and an ill-conditioned 
sort of honesty. The other extreme of a timorous 
subservience to the good opinion of everybody who 
chooses to have an opinion about one is absolutely 
fatal to every virtue in the list of virtues. It has 
been said that the meek are blessed, for they shall 
inherit the earth. But there are obviously two 
sorts of meekness. The one makes a man think 
little of himself in comparison with some exalted 
ideal. It does not mean an unreasonable dispa- 
ragement of our own powers or merits in favour 
of those of other people, or a humble fetching and 
carrying in obedience to the views and feelings of 
indifferent persons, who have no better means of 



88 Studies in Conduct. 

forming sound views than we have ourselves, and 
whose feelings ought only to count for something 
after it has been ascertained that we have none of 
our own. At a time when the tremendous spread 
of wealth has begotten in most men a strong de- 
sire for material comfort and the luxurious deco- 
rations of life, which on the whole can be more 
easily and certainly secured by compliance than by 
anything like self-assertion, there is an irresistible 
inducement to this general conformity. To be in 
all things of a neutral tint is the secret of that 
sort of success which is most coveted by average 
minds. The consequences of this colourless mo- 
deration upon the robustness of character which 
it is so desirable to maintain are plain and inevit- 
able. The smugness bred in a man who has made 
it the prime effort of his life to please other people, 
and who has been all things to all men with suc- 
cess, is a far more unmistakeable proof of weakness 
than any amount of arrogance and self-confidence. 
The excess of self-confidence is a mistake, but it 
may be justified by achievements. Smug humility 
is a mistake too ; it means nothing, in most cases, 
but a very sly selfishness. 

The social trimmer often refreshes himself in 
his course by recalling the old saying that we ought 
always to treat our friend as though he might one 
day be our enemy, and our enemy as though he 
might one day be our friend. He forgets that this 



Trimmers. 89 

is one of those half-truths which are only meant 
for special application. It is a useful and a just 
thing to say to men of an extravagantly ardent 
and impetuous temperament. Volatile and capri- 
cious people, who love their friends for a while with 
a childish enthusiasm, and then presently hate 
them with a childish fury, may be induced by such 
a maxim to moderate their excesses. But the 
moment it is expanded into a precept for universal 
and unconditional use, enjoining us to quench the 
fire of a just enmity, and to moderate discreetly 
the flow of generous and tender sympathy, then it 
becomes simply the expression of a form of pru- 
dence than which it is impossible to conceive any- 
thing more profoundly low-minded. The high- 
minded man knows that there are some whom he 
is obliged to stoop to call enemies, for lack of an- 
other word, and whom nothing short of a complete 
and disastrous revolution in his own character 
could make into any other than enemies. Some- 
body in a novel says, with reference to somebody 
else who has been guilty of a shameful wrong, " I 
shall be a villain on the day I shake that man's 
hand." This is not the sign of a malignant and 
unforgiving temper, but of a robust hate of mean- 
ness and iniquity and cold-blooded wrongdoing. 
The systematic trimmer would not refuse the 
friendly advances of the most impenitent villain 
that ever lived. He would not clasp him to his 



90 Studies in Conduct, 

bosom, because this is inconsistent with trimming 
principles ; but he would treat him very much as 
he treats the most honest of his friends, and he 
cannot do more. 

Contempt for trimmers is apt, with rash minds, 
to produce an error on the other side, and to make 
them morbidly anxious to express their likes and 
dislikes, their approval and disapproval, when no 
rational purpose is served by this vigorous dissi- 
dence. They are quite uneasy until they have 
disburdened their feelings. And they like being 
on the unpopular side, not exactly out of mere 
crotchettiness, but because, having accustomed 
themselves to dispute the will of the prosperous 
and the majority, they acquire a permanent taste 
for being in the minority. As soon as the minority 
becomes victorious, then it seems that their occu- 
pation is gone. They suddenly discover all the 
merits of the cause that has been vanquished, and 
are half-repentant at the victory they helped to 
gain. They feel most at home when they are as- 
sailing a popular idol, and showing their disrespect 
for him. If there is anything to be gained by 
espousing one side or taking one course rather than 
another, this in itself constitutes a good reason 
against such a course. In the same way, they see 
all the good points of their enemies, and do not 
object to expatiate on them, while to the good 
points of their friends they feel it a duty to be 



Trimmers. y i 

very blind. If a roan can be useful to them, they 
are disposed to treat him with a certain stiffness 
and distrust. In short, at every point they love to 
prove themselves impracticable and awkward. The 
sort of man who keeps in with everybody, who can 
have books and busts from all sides, is at least 
much pleasanter than people of this temper. 



—A® 



X. 



SHORT CUTS. 



QPHI PROFESSOR at Heidelberg is said to 
have lately offered a very handsome 
prize for the best essay which shall be 
sent in, showing how to remove de- 
spotic and unconstitutional Cabinets from office, 
without resorting to the barbarous method of a 
revolution. One thousand florins will reward the 
ingenious inventor of the most practicable solu- 
tion of the problem, while the sagacious donor, 
whose proposal is made " in the interest of the 
science of the law," will have the satisfaction, 
worth many thousand millions of florins, of know- 
ing that he has been the means of promoting a 
discovery compared with which every other that 
has ever been made is valueless and clumsy. Many 
people will at once exclaim that such a notion is 
just what we expect from Professors, particularly 



Short Cuts. 93 

German Professors. It never would occur to any- 
body but a professor that a bloodless moral siege 
might be laid to men like Von Bismarck, or Straf- 
ford^ or Napoleon Bonaparte, which would con- 
strain them to lay down their unconstitutional arms 
and surrender at discretion. It is conjectured to 
be the business of this distinguished order to devise 
absurdities at which wiser men laugh. Grown-up 
practical people are amused by them, just as the 
robust and sound boys of a village divert them- 
selves with the vagaries of the parish idiot. Yet, 
after all, it is not certain that the Heidelberg Don 
Quixote is so much sillier than the rest of man- 
kind. He only wants to find out a short cut to a 
place which, as is visible enough to less eager peo- 
ple, can only be reached by a toilsome journey 
along the high-road. We may think him a dreamy 
blockhead for supposing that there can be such a 
thing as a short road to the results of revolution 
without undergoing the turmoil and disturbance 
of revolution, just as we should if he offered his 
thousand florins for the best way of teaching little 
boys Latin without giving them the trouble of 
learning. It is barely possible that the Professor 
may be indulging in a very elaborate piece of hu- 
mour. Perhaps we shall presently see announced 
that no essay was worthy of the prize, and that 
therefore the task of showing how a strong uncon- 
stitutional Cabinet can be deposed without a revo- 



94 Studies in Conduct. 

lution is one to solve which all the essay- writers in 
Germany are incompetent. But most of us act on 
just the same principle in matters that interest us 
as keenly as the freedom of his country interests 
the German Professor, and in which to our neigh- 
bours we seem to be quite as foolish. To desire to 
possess, without being burdened with the trouble 
of acquiring, is as much a sign of weakness, as to 
recognize that everything worth having is only to 
be got by paying its price is the prime secret of 
practical strength. A few seemingly lucky mor- 
tals get their penny for their hour's work, while 
the rest have had to bear the heat and burden of 
the day for it. This is obviously the exception, 
not the rule. And even here, the question of luck 
turns upon the comparative pleasure of standing 
idle all the day about the market-place, or spending 
the time in honest work. Perhaps the men who 
enjoy both the penny and the labour are better 
off, if they only knew their own good, than the 
men who have the penny only and lose the la- 
bour. At all events, the temper of modern times 
is altogether in this direction. But, be the de- 
light in labour ever so vigorous, it is always less 
strong than the delight in the successful results of 
labour. One may very distinctly prefer industry 
to indolence, the healthful exercise of all one's 
faculties to allowing them to rest unused in drowsy 
torpor. In the long-run, we shall probably find 



Short Cuts. 95 

that the exercise of the faculties has of itself been 
the source of a more genuine happiness than has 
followed the actual attainment of what the exer- 
cise w r as directed to procure. Stilly when a man 
looks either backward or forward upon his life, he 
is accustomed to measure its success in the one 
case by the specific ends which he has achieved, 
and in the other by those which he hopes to 
achieve. The spaces between, which are of more 
real moment, he is most concerned to make as 
short as possible. It does not produce any dif- 
ference in his zeal in getting over the ground to 
know that, as soon as the next point is reached, 
he will only have the sooner to commence another 
and another stage. He loses three-fourths of the 
pleasure of the journey through a headlong anxiety 
to get safely to the end of it. 

Unfortunately, there are also a great many 
stages which only the very grandest of philoso- 
phers can bring themselves to look upon as any- 
thing but grievous and wearisome. In fact, when- 
ever the object is one that is desired with suffi- 
cient eagerness, the path that we have to traverse 
before reaching it is sure to seem never-ending, 
and beset with thorns and stony places. And as 
most people desire something very strongly which 
is not immediately within their reach, most people 
know what it is to see one of these long, straight, 
dusty, unshaded pieces of road in front of them, 



()6 Studies in Conduct. 

and to yearn for a shorter cut. One of the most 
important of the many differences between wise 
men and fools is that the one put no trust in short 
cuts, while the other are continually wasting time 
and hope and energy in trying to find them, and 
then in floundering back into the main road again, 
to see the wise man ever so many miles ahead of 
them. 

And of all the short cuts by w r hich it is pro- 
posed to avoid the inevitable, none is so popular, 
or so delusive either, as that in which the Hei- 
delberg Professor advertises his belief — the con- 
viction that we are sure to arrive safely and easily 
at the end of the journey if we will only talk and 
write perseveringly enough. We shall get all we 
want if we write prize essays, or, supposing we 
cannot write them, if we diligently read them. 
Observe, all this does not mean that w r e are to 
wile the tedium of the way with talk, but that 
talk is to be our single motive-power. Suppose 
a man has allowed a number of bad habits to 
get the mastery over him, if he is of the profes- 
sorial temperament, he will shudder at the thought 
of dispelling his tyrants by setting a violent moral 
revolution on foot within his own mind. He wants 
a more comfortable method, and he would gladly 
give a thousand florins, or any other sum, to some 
ingenious person who could instruct him in the 
delightful art of exterminating vices without pain 



Short Cats. 97 

or confusion. The idea of recovering moral free- 
dom by a courteous, gentle, sympathetic treatment 
of oneself is not at all more chimerical than the 
dream of recovering political freedom by polite 
suasion and prize essays. There is some novelty 
in the introduction of this idea into public affairs. 
Among individuals it is perhaps as old as the race. 
It is natural that people should shrink from what 
is painful, and we cannot reasonably expect a man 
to admit with cheerful alacrity that the disorder 
from which he knows himself to be suffering can 
only be successfully dealt with by means of knife 
and cautery. He prefers to delude himself with 
the hope that a few doses of not too unpleasant 
physic will work as complete a cure as he stands 
in need of. In the case of bodily ills, this playing 
the fool with himself is sure to come pretty speedily 
to its end. The body revenges itself for all these 
cheats that are attempted to be put upon it with 
swift and visible vengeance. But the more per- 
severingly and audaciously a man cajoles his moral 
sight, the more tricks he plays with his own self- 
respect, the less sensible does he become of the 
mischief that he is breeding within himself, and 
the more facile a prey to renewed cajoleries and 
more infatuated deceptions. He thinks he has 
found a short and easy method of attaining virtue 
and highmindedness, when in truth he is only 
sinking more and more inextricably into their 

H 



98 Studies in Conduct. 

opposites. This is the sure fate of everybody who 
declines to face the toils and burden of the road, 
who, finding himself enslaved by follies or vices, 
and preserving enough moral sense to recognize 
that the true goal is wisdom and virtue, yet dreads 
to encounter the strangeness and the roughness 
and the unwelcome hardness of a new set of 
habits. 

Some men flatter themselves that they have an 
uncommon eye for moral country. They admit 
that in seeking for happiness by self-indulgence 
they have somehow gone wrong, and got no nearer 
to the desired end. But they will not listen to a 
suggestion that they should return, with what force 
is left them, into the neighbourhood of the beaten 
track, and they stubbornly refuse to recognize 
that they have got themselves into a moral cul-de- 
sac. Insisting that they discern this or that way 
out of the maze, they only get from one alley to 
find themselves fast enclosed in another. The sil- 
ver thread of self-denial which would conduct them 
back into the path is unobserved, w T hile their feet 
wander at random wherever an uncontrolled incli- 
nation leads them. In spite of the wretchedness 
which this, for a time, may entail, they take heart 
of grace, and even while convinced that they have 
irrecoverably lost their way, they still prefer the 
snugness of their cul-de-sac to the frowsy career of 
the Puritan or the hide-bound moral pedant. For- 



Short Cuts. 99 

tunately, this is not the true alternative. But even 
those whom weakness of will, or a too great eager- 
ness to reach by a short cut what is only attain- 
able by prolonged plodding, or a radical miscon- 
ception not only of the way to happiness but of its 
very nature, has led into straits and shallows, 
are not even there free from the tendency to Pha- 
risaism which is so strong in every sort and con- 
dition of men. There is such a thing as a kind of 
inverted Pharisaism, and it is no paradox to say 
that there are sinners and publicans in abund- 
ance who constantly thank Heaven that they are 
not as other men are — meaning, by other men, the 
ninety and nine just persons who need no re- 
pentance. 

Besides the self-indulgent temper which leads 
men to take what with unsuitable subtlety they 
think a short cut to happiness generally, there is 
a certain sort of impetuosity which impels others 
to go through life seeking each particular object 
they desire on the same principle. They are con- 
cerned with ends only, and are indifferent about 
the means, even comprising in that iu difference 
what to others are not only means but ends at the 
same time. Provided a thing be done, the shorter 
and more expeditious the way of doing it the 
better for everybody interested. In an age which 
chiefly prides itself on the speed of its locomotives, 
on the rapidity of its telegraphic communication, 

H 2 



ioo Studies in Conduct. 

on the arrangements which permit you to sup in 
London and breakfast in Edinburgh the next morn- 
ings there is nothing surprising in the prevalence 
of such a way of looking at the affairs of life in 
general. The extension of business principles to 
matters that belong to a different sphere may be 
illogical, but it is not unnatural. The immode- 
rate haste, the matter-of-fact fashions of the busi- 
ness world, cannot but infect the world outside. 
In the transaction of affairs, dispatch, prompti- 
tude, straightforward unadorned speech, are the 
most useful qualities. The shortest cut is always 
the best. But in the general conduct of life this 
haste to get to the end prevents you from seeing 
all the finer sights on the road. Unremitting 
thought how you may shorten the way from here 
to yonder leaves no liberty for harbouring the 
richer thoughts, which would flow in from every 
side to the man who had a mind to make the best 
of his life's course as it went on. The notion that 
if a thing is to be done at all, " then 'twere well 
'twere done quickly," admirable as it may be on 
the Exchange, rubs the delicacy and bloom off 
life when it is made the ruling maxim in all other 
relations and positions. A leisurely life, with time 
for contemplation, and for watching and examin- 
ing all that we pass, is a much more enviable and 
rational lot than a swift rushing from one goal to 
another, from one sort of fame of power or opu- 



Short Cuts. 



101 



lence to another and more remote. Nothing can 
in a general way involve a much greater waste of 
life than a passion for the shortest cut, whether it 
be to obtain something agreeable or to escape what 
is disagreeable. 




XI. 



YOUTHFUL PROMISE. 




| T is as great a puzzle to know what be- 
comes of all the promising young men, 
as it was to the little girl of the story 
where on earth all the bad people were 
buried. Most persons have at one time or another 
congratulated themselves on possessing a child of 
remarkable promise, and then been awakened to 
see a most ordinary and commonplace fulfilment. 
Fortunately they have, as a rule, acquired sense 
enough in the interval to enable them to bear the 
disappointment with proper resignation. For the 
ambition of parents for their children, like the 
ambition on their own behalf, undergoes wonder- 
ful changes as their experience of the world grows 
wider. The father who gives a tip to his boy for 
getting to the top of his class is apt to entertain a 
vague and complacent conviction that he is rearing 



Youthful Promise. 103 

an archbishop or a chancellor or a great author, 
just as his own tastes may happen to lie. But ten 
years later he is amazingly pleased to learn that 
his lad evinces a genius for book-keeping by double- 
entry, and for mounting his high stool with punc- 
tuality. Just in the same way, the lad's ambition 
gets gradually modified. What at first would have 
seemed a pitiful aim indeed slowly assumes the 
proportions of a crowning success. In life, as in 
other journeys, distances are wonderfully decep- 
tive; and the peaks and pinnacles which to the 
ardour and inexperience of youth seem quite close 
at hand, and easily accessible, generally turn out 
to be ever so remote, and only surmountable, if at 
all, by vigorous and prolonged efforts, for which 
only a few constitutions, specially trained and cir- 
cumstanced, are hardy and agile enough. 

One great secret of the exaggerated notions en- 
tertained about promising youths is the confusion 
of conduct with capacity, of goodness with power. 
By promise, people must commonly mean promise 
of those things in gaining which intellectual ability 
tells more than any quantity of well-regulated 
affections and decorous counting-house virtues. 
They mean those great professional prizes, and 
.ofty political positions, and grand literary reputa- 
tions which are won by vigour, acuteness, breadth, 
or profundity of understanding. The grounds on 
which a lad earns a reputation for promise are, in 



104 Studies in Conduct, 

an ordinary way, exclusively moral grounds. He 
is industrious, persevering, docile, well-mannered. 
He always knows his lessons, and is never insolent 
or quarrelsome. And this sort of "good boy" 
may very well be called a boy of promise, and it is 
probable that his life will be one of more even 
happiness than that of the boy of fulfilment. But 
then the results which he is likely to achieve, sa- 
tisfactory as they may be in themselves, are not at 
all those which his too partial friends delight to 
anticipate for him. Punctuality and conformity 
to discipline, and an aversion to blots and dog- 
eared books and the ruder tastes of his compeers, 
are very excellent things, and they certainly pro- 
mise a tombstone on which the characteristics of a 
tender husband, a good father, and a just citizen 
will have more than their conventional significance. 
Still, friends, ambitious by proxy, aspire to some- 
thing more than an unusually truthful tombstone. 
An immortal poem, or a series of unrivalled ora- 
tions, or a history which shall live as long as our 
language, or a political wisdom and beneficence 
which shall win the undying gratitude of the poor 
— this is the kind of object which they expect their 
promising favourite to propose to himself and to 
attain. The most saintly abhorrence of blots, un- 
fortunately, is not the only requisite for a great 
poet, perhaps is no requisite at all. The youth 
who has never in his life disobeyed a master, or 



Youthful Promise. 105 

neglected the smallest monition of his college- 
tutor^ or once missed attendance at chapel, may 
still not be eloquent or profound. Charles James 
Fox, as he appeared at the gambling-table with his 
coat turned inside out for luck, or lying in the hot 
weather pretty nearly stark naked on the sofa, 
would scarcely have been thought a young man of 
promise. Yet he was a man of fulfilment for all 
that. He would have done a great deal more if 
he had not frequented the tables, no doubt; but 
he is one out of ten thousand illustrations of the 
commonplace that a man may make a great mark 
in spite of almost every vice that human nature 
can fall into. And it is this making a great mark 
which is predicted when a young man is said to be 
of wonderful promise. 

Of course the converse error is much more per- 
nicious and stupid, though it is not at all rare, of 
arguing that he must be a genius who displays an 
habitual disregard of the proprieties of conduct. 
Lying about without clothes in hot weather, or 
hastening to ruin on the Turf, is no sure guarantee 
for the possession of eloquence or political ability 
or anything else. A total disrespect for the good 
opinion of persons around one may, on certain sub- 
jects, be a very wholesome and promising charac- 
teristic, and the person whom it marks may do 
excellent service both to himself and others in 
virtue of it; but where an ignoble kind of self- 



106 Studies in Conduct. 

indulgence prompts this disrespect, it can only, in 
spite of the example of Fox and plenty of others, 
prove a hindrance to him at every point. Hence 
the infatuated folly of parents, or of the young 
men themselves, who mistake all sorts of sheer bad 
habits for spirit and originality ; the truth being 
that neither bad habits nor good habits are the 
cause or the measure of that native vigour of mind 
which lies at the root of the most conspicuous and 
glittering of the successes of life. 

This vigour can only be tested, if at all, in the 
most hopelessly imperfect way during the time of 
youth ; and so people form their judgments of a 
man's future from one or two moral qualities, 
which in truth have much less to do with the kind 
of future they are thinking about than the intellec- 
tual qualities which they have scarcely any trust- 
worthy means of measuring. We nearly always 
find in the biographies of distinguished men, that 
at school or college they gave no remarkable sign 
of their future power ; and even where this is not 
the case, the predictions of greatness may com- 
monly be traced to a time after the greatness had 
been achieved. The child may, in a sense, be 
father to the man ; and nobody of any judgment 
will deny that we are born with peculiar tempera- 
ments and our own individual predispositions. But 
character is the compound product of predisposi- 
tions and experience. You cannot predict any- 



Youthful Promise. 107 

thing of the product until you know something of 
the second of these factors, and even then it is un- 
sound to argue that the combination of what seem 
like the same temperaments with what appears to 
be the same sort of experience will always be iden- 
tical. Experience, or perhaps we should rather 
say the demand for independent action, every clay 
gives rise to conduct which astounds us and mys- 
tifies all our calculations. It is impossible to be 
quite sure how a boy or a young man will turn out 
after he has looked out upon the world beyond the 
class-room. This uncertainty is notorious, even in 
respect of the moral half of character. Lads who 
have been angels with pure white wings up to one- 
and-twenty not seldom develop — by a process, we 
suppose, of natural selection' — into imps with hor- 
rid horns and hoofs before they have left home a 
twelvemonth. But the influence of the demands 
of life upon the intellectual part of men is often 
still more extraordinary and still more unforesee- 
able. 

Some, whom on account of their school-room 
virtues their friends insisted on raising aloft on 
pedestals, no sooner get fairly out into the big 
world than they seem to be scared by the size of 
things, and to be utterly lacking in that intrepidity 
of the intellect which is so needful for great suc- 
cesses. Others, again, whose intellectual energies 
have hitherto passed for second-rate, and of whom 



io8 Studies in Conduct. 

nobody entertained very sanguine hopes, have their 
imagination excited, their faculties braced, all their 
powers stimulated, by the novelty and bnstle and 
Brobdignagian dimensions of the new scene to 
which they are introduced. The nature of this 
impression, and the way in which it strikes people 
of different original quality, are points nearly al- 
ways overlooked in talk about early promise. 

Intellectual intrepidity, as it is one of the most 
vital conditions of that eminent success which 
people urgently desire for their sons or their 
friends, is just that at which men of promise ordi- 
narily stop short of fulfilment. With manful as- 
surance they march up to the fight, but discretion 
suddenly steps in and freezes their intent. Every- 
body understands what this means in a physical 
conflict, but not everybody discerns how the same 
thing may occur to men who think of entering the 
arena where the contest is not waged with the arm 
of flesh. We all admire the courage which enables 
a man to lead his men against a battery or to join 
a forlorn hope, and we admit that such a virtue is 
the first essential of a successful warrior. But 
we do not usually understand how much the same 
quality, only intellectual instead of physical, is 
needed in a man who sits down to write the his- 
tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire, or of Modern Civilization, or who aspires to 
be a conspicuous power in the political world, or 



Youthful Promise. 109 

to attain distinguished success in science or philo- 
sophy. Yet these are the results too commonly 
anticipated in the expression that So-and-so, under 
five«and-twenty, is a person of great promise; 
which, being interpreted, means that he is indus- 
trious and of good morality, and decently intelli- 
gent. That he should be all this is, as we have 
already said, promising, but only as far as it goes. 
It promises comfort and good repute, and nothing 
else ; and even then the promise is not worth 
much, as a thing to rely on, when we reflect how 
often the first whiff of the world blows away the 
surface habits of youth into space, making all clean 
and garnished for the reception of seven or some 
other number of devils and unclean spirits. 

But exemplary conduct is not the only thing 
from which promise is wrongly inferred. It is 
equally common to find people mistaking ambition 
for capacity. The strength of the passion for fame 
is supposed to be some measure of the intellectual 
strength required for gratifying it, and foolish per- 
sons fancy that, if a young man only starts in life 
with a sufficiently vehement desire to get to the 
top of the tree, be cannot fail. Put in a point- 
blank way, nobody could be taken in by the fal- 
lacy; only people do not put things to themselves 
in this way. We are always more or less ready to 
take appearance for reality in matters which do 
not concern ourselves personally in any very ur- 



i to Studies in Conduct. 

gent degree, and to allow people to pass themselves 
off at their own estimate. So if a young fellow 
gives one to understand, quietly of course, and 
without braggadocio or bluster, that he has a vehe- 
ment desire — and in the days of youth desire is 
synonymous with intention — to rise to eminence 
in some given line, one is disposed to give him 
credit for possessing the ability which the attain- 
ment of his desire would imply. Hence he is 
given out to be a man of extraordinary promise — - 
promise in this case only meaning what his conceit 
and rash confidence promise to themselves, and 
not what his abilities justify. 

After all, the misunderstanding of what consti- 
tutes promise is only a branch of the wider igno- 
rance of the conditions of success generally. Dr. 
Johnson we think it was who said that youth al- 
ways miscalculates two things — the value of money, 
and the difficulty of reaching eminence. Young 
men disregard and waste the one, and they think 
they can have the other by merely wishing and 
asking. But is youth the only age at which one 
calculates the pains of winning distinction far be- 
low their true magnitude ? Does not everybody, 
except those who have already tried to advance 
some way up the steep path, think the ascent a 
great deal easier than it is ? True, there are 
crowds of impostors in the Temple of Fame, who 
have got up where they are by bubbles or balloons. 



Youthful Promise. i i ; 

But they are only there for a time. Perhaps it 
may comfort men who discover that what they or 
their friends mistook for promise is nothing of the 
sort, to reflect that even those who most deserve 
eminence only enjoy it for a while. And, besides 
that, the atmosphere of these lofty peaks would 
most likely prove not at all congenial to those 
others whom nature and circumstances have united 
to fit for the plain. 





XII. 



CROSSING RUBICONS. 




|T is not at all surprising to find that 
Ceesar himself makes no mention of 
the scene on the banks of the Rubi- 
con out of which subsequent chroni- 
clers invented the famous legend. In all momen- 
tous enterprises, whether they are of national or 
only of private dimensions, men rather shirk the 
recognition of a final and decisive step, than seek a 
dramatic excitement from the knowledge that the 
die is cast. They are scarcely likely to find any 
comfort in the reflection that they are just on the 
point of doing something which they will never on 
any conditions be able to undo. Probably even 
the most resolute disposition is glad to hide from 
itself the iron bonds which it has just forged. It 
is only a fool who can cross his Rubicon, either to 
enslave a people or to marry a wife, with a gleeful 



Crossing Rubicons. 113 

enjoyment of the consciousness that he is doing 
for himself, one way or another. It is all very 
well, on the stage or in novels, for a hero to march 
off to death or victory w r ith an elated stride, and 
with a fine apophthegm on his lips, but in real life 
the tremendous significance of the alternative pre- 
sents itself a great deal too forcibly and nakedly 
to allow of much of this magnificent hilarity. Toi 
a cool outsider, the cry of " Death or Victory," 
" Splendour or Ruin/' has the sound and air of a 
very fine antithesis about it. For the combatant 
himself there is somewhat too much at stake to 
leave his mind quite free to appreciate the charm- 
ing antithetical completeness of the two possible 
terminations of his undertaking. It is certainly 
pleasanter, from the dramatic point of view, to 
picture to oneself Julius Csesar, amid the acclama- 
tions of his soldiers, dashing across the ford and 
crying ' ' Be the die cast/' than to think of that 
other Caesar of more modern times sitting, on the 
corresponding occasion, pale, bloodless, and silent, 
gnawing his nails over the fire at the Elysee. But 
the last is the truer type of the behaviour of men 
at the decisive epochs of life — that is to say, pro- 
vided they know that the epoch is decisive. 

Only it happens to most of us that we cross the 
Rubicon without any notion that it differs from all 
the other streams that encounter us in the journey. 
We- are ignorant that the passage of this particular 

1 



i*4 Studies in Conduct. 

boundary commits us to a definite or hazardous 
course for the rest of our days. The die is thrown 
without anybody knowing it, and it is not till 
afterwards that one discovers which face came 
uppermost. But this is a commonplace. The 
most fifth-rate novelist in the world can expatiate 
upon it through endless pages of pathetic moral- 
izings. "Ah, little did she know that he whose 
name she then heard for the first time, and whom 
she was that day about to meet, would have his 
fate inextricably bound up with her own sad des- 
tiny. O my friends, if we all only knew/' and so 
on. Every other novel we read has something in 
this strain. Such pathos, easy and on the surface 
as it is, seldom fails of a certain effect. 

There is no sort of depth in such, a set of reflec- 
tions, because they are only sentimental variations 
of the very obvious and not very practical truth 
that we cannot foresee the future, with the corol- 
lary that, if we could, we should most likely act 
differently from the way in which we act as it is. 
The fashion of growing tearful over any of the 
inexorable conditions of life, from death, the most 
inexorable of them all, downwards, engenders a 
state of feeling as little profitable as any that one 
can imagine. The relations between men and 
women are a very favourite field for these windy 
reflections. It certainly is rather sad and startling 
to think that you may possibly at the last croquet 



Crossing Rubicons. 1 15 

party have met a young lady who is destined to 
embitter the rest of your days, and bring your 
grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. But then any- 
body who habitually yielded to this cheerful tone 
of thought would either baffle his destiny by 
avoiding all young ladies, or else would anticipate 
its horrors in these preliminary apprehensions. 
The only practical good that can arise from ob- 
serving how unconsciously we may take the most 
decisive steps for good or for evil is that it may 
teach us to cultivate such a general habit of wise 
thinking and wise acting as to lessen, and in some 
matters almost to destroy, the chances of being 
hurried across the fatal stream unawares. 

The worst of it is that even this is only a faint 
sort of protection, because the fact of somebody 
else having taken a decisive step is constantly just 
as weighty for you as if it had been your own 
doing. The Pompeians crossed no Rubicon, but 
Csesar's doing so was fully as momentous to them 
as anything they could have done for themselves. 
It is very proper and elevating to believe that 
" Man is man and master of his fate." Practically 
this is by far the most important and the most 
worthy aspect of human action, and to lose sight 
of this as the greatest of all principles in its kind 
is to suffer a complete moral paralysis. Only, in 
surveying life, it is childish not to see that a man is 
not by any means the only master of his owu fate. 

I 2 



1 1 6 Studies in Conduct. 

It has been said of politics, but it is still more widely 
true, that " Le coupable a souvent disparu qucind le 
chdtiment arrive." His father and mother, and 
all the generations before them, have something 
to do with it, and so have his children. The 
misery which befalls a mother who has been be- 
reaved of her child is an element in her fate over 
which she can have no mastery, and so are ten 
thousand other things which must inevitably enter 
into the lot of a social being with any relation or 
dealings with his neighbours or the species at 
large. The certainty, however, that one may, and 
very often does, cross the Rubicon by proxy, or 
suffer the consequences of other people's exploits, 
is not a wholesome or useful thing to reflect upon. 
It is very apt to saddle a man with the snug, but 
particularly unprofitable habit of letting himself 
off too lightly and easily; and anything which tends 
ever so remotely to diminish the sense of each 
man's strict responsibility for his own conduct is 
best kept in the background. 

There is a great difference between unwillingness 
to think very much about the tremendous conse- 
quences which may follow upon having taken a 
decisive step, and an habitual unwillingness to take 
the step itself. The one implies merely a sober 
caution of mind ; the other entails all the dire 
miseries of helpless irresolution. A not infrequent 
result of these miseries is to drive the sufferer into 



Crossing Rubicons. 117 

an opposite habit of over-quick resoluteness. A 
readiness in a man to exult in the fact that he has 
done something which he cannot undo, that he has 
pledged himself to a course from which he cannot 
draw back, is more commonly the sign of a weak 
than of a strong nature. The comfort of plunging 
right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody 
who has been accustomed to stand shivering and 
irresolute on the bank. When a person of this 
sort has brought himself to take the plunge, his 
exultation and fearlessness are wonderful. The 
knowledge that the Rubicon is crossed, and the 
die cast, seems to relieve him from the necessity 
of further resolution. He has set in motion a 
machine which will of itself wind off results and 
consequences for him without more ado on his 
own part ; and this is an order of release from the 
demands of circumstance upon his will, for which 
he cannot be too thankful. So he comes at last 
really to be fond of crossing Rubicons, and taking 
decisive measures, just because they are decisive. 
A good many people, one fancies, get married on 
this principle. They persuade themselves that 
marriage is a yoke, pleasant or otherwise, which 
they are destined one day to go under. But the 
labour of exercising a very careful and deliberate 
choice is more than they can bear ; so they rush 
blindly across the stream, really relieved at being 
able to cry out "Alea jacta est" In too many 



n8 Studies in Conduct. 

cases, this method may remind us of Mr. Micaw- 
ber's exclamation when he had satisfied his credi- 
tor by a bill at three months — " There ! thank 
God, that's paid I" It is not good, in the delight- 
ful sense of freedom after having done something 
decisive, to forget that rather grave part of the 
transaction — its consequences. The enormous 
relief of having decided somehow is perhaps too 
dearly bought if it should in time appear that the 
decision was the wrong one. 

The same tendency to quick and resolute deci- 
sions, which may give relief to weak natures in 
one way, may in another way possess a very fatal 
attraction for strong natures too. A weak man 
will trust to a throw of the die as lief as anything 
else, because he has not force of character enough 
to compel his judgment to strike a balance between 
opposing considerations and bring out a clear 
practical conclusion. A strong man — strong in 
will and foresight, that is — may be equally tempted 
to trust almost to chance to fix his line of conduct 
for him. He may realize so clearly the thousand 
complexities which enter into every man's life, he 
may be so penetrated with a sense of the extraor- 
dinary way in which unforeseen circumstances arise 
to divert the channel which he would like to mark 
out, as to place comparatively small value on the 
most deliberate efforts of his own judgment to hit 
on the right courses. Or the point in his fortunes 



Crossing Rubicons. 119 

may be so critical that lie loses his nerve, and 
thinks that drawing lots, or tossing up a coin, or 
the sortes YirgUiance, will answer quite as well as 
any other means for finding out the best thing to 
be done. The Roman legend about Caesar was 
that, in the midst of his hesitation, there suddenly 
appeared a comely and god-like youth playing on 
a pipe, until, suddenly throwing aside the pipe, 
he snatched a trumpet, and with a mighty war- 
like blast plunged into the waters of the Rubicon. 
The miraculous apparition filled the leader with 
an instant and vigorous resolution which plain 
reason had wholly failed to inspire. There is a 
great deal of figurative truth in this. People no 
longer believe that comely divinities appear to a 
man in a crisis of his fortunes, but the comely 
divinity is not without his counterpart. Things no 
less unreal occupy his place in critical moments. In 
marriage, for example, are not men and women con- 
stantly led to take the irrevocable step, not by the 
conclusions of reason and judgment, but because 
they are beckoned on by seemly apparitions whom 
at the other side of the stream they see no more? 
And they do this consciously and deliberately, 
from some sort of superstition, it would seem, that 
a crisis in their affairs is so momentous a thing that 
at this, rather than other times, they ought to sur- 
render their cool judgment to a spectre or a fancy. 
Considering these and a hundred other infirmi- 



120 Studies in Conduct. 

ties of ordinary human character, it is not a little 
fortunate that there are so few opportunities for 
a man to take an irretrievably wrong turning. 
Everybody is pretty sure to miss his way more or 
less, but there are not so many turnings in life in 
which people can finally lose themselves beyond 
hope of recovery. The fatal turnings are there, 
unfortunately, in abundance, but with most of us 
education and tradition and surrounding example 
make it morally impossible that we should be 
deceived by them. It is perhaps startling to re- 
flect how many people are honest, say, not on first 
principles, but simply through the influence of 
tradition. They have never gone further or deeper 
than the tradition, and have scarcely thought about 
the principles at all. The same may be said about 
a good many other virtues of old and established 
repute. And so, at a crisis in his life, a mam's 
conduct is vastly influenced by the general views 
entertained about similarly critical junctures in 
the case of other people. Julius Caesar crossed 
the Rubicon dramatically and heroically, but his 
soldiers crossed it like sheep. And this is the 
style in which the majority of us perform the same 
momentous exploit. We put confidence in Caesar, 
or Mrs. Grundy, or whoever may be our favourite 
leader, and plunge in without much thought, 
whether it is a Rubicon or a duckpond that lies in 
front of us. 



XIII. 



UNFAIR ADVANTAGES. 




VEUY limited observation of the ways 
of the world is enough to show one 
how the tremendous struggle for so- 
cial existence and supremacy is apt, 
in all but exceptionally generous natures, to deve- 
lop a certain meanness towards competitors. The 
struggle is so severe, and the powers and merits of 
the rivals are commonly so very nearly equal in 
the balance, that the slightest favouring circum- 
stance is eagerly seized, without a too careful scru- 
tiny of the fairness or worthiness of taking such 
an advantage. Nobody can be blamed for doing 
his best to get on in the world ; in other words, to 
procure as much of reputation and wealth and 
power, and all the other pleasant and desirable 
things of the world, as he honestly can. It would 
be a serious misfortune if men with superior powers 



122 Studies in Conduct. 

were to give up using them, in order that their 
pre-eminence might cease to hurt the feelings of 
weaker brethren. Neither Christian charity nor 
any other admitted virtue entails upon men the 
obligation of weighting themselves down to the 
capacity of their dullest and feeblest neighbours. 
The philosophers who have amused themselves by 
founding great Utopian commonwealths sometimes 
proscribe competition, and fix the clever and in- 
dustrious people of a society immovably in the 
same position as that taken by the blockheads and 
sluggards. This error is one to which our own 
age is least of all exposed. We are much more 
likely to fall into its opposite of spurring on ability 
too hotly, and depreciating the function of block- 
heads too impatiently. One consequence of this 
exaltation of intellectual power is that everybody, 
the dunce included, aspires and makes a claim to 
it; and so an inclination is begotten to-be for ever 
measuring ourselves with other people, our capacity 
with their capacity, our opportunities with their 
opportunities, our success at a certain age with 
theirs at the same age, our prospects with their 
prospects. 

A. wise man — we do not mean a clever man only 
— will not fall into this hurtful habit. Of course 
he cannot help occasionally comparing what he 
thinks he can do, and what he knows he has done, 
with the capabilities and achievements of men who 



Unfair Advantages, 1 23 

started in the race by his side, or whose labours 
have been carried on in his own department ; but 
the occasions for this sort of comparison will be 
avoided, and when they are forced upon him he will 
not make too much of them. At all events he will 
not insist upon standing back to back with every- 
body he meets, and crying out to the onlookers to 
observe the distinct hundredth part of an inch by 
which he tops his man. Yet there are plenty of 
people — people, too, who are sharp-sighted enough 
to know better — with whom this is an invariable 
practice. A person of this stamp, whenever he 
hears of a distinguished or successful man, straight- 
way puts the distinguished man into one dish of an 
imaginary balance and himself into the other. There 
is no difficulty in guessing the nature of the pro- 
cess which is gone through, or of the results which 
it most satisfactorily establishes. The number of 
allowances which are made, and the ingenious 
makeweights which find their way into the dish of 
the man who is weighing himself, are inexhaustible. 
The opportunities of his adversary — the possession 
of a competency, the enjoyment of more vigorous 
health, the greater freedom from family encum- 
brances, and a thousand other considerations, partly 
real and partly imaginary — serve to lighten the 
genuine merit of the one to a wonderful extent, 
and are so much, therefore, on the side of the 
other. The man even whose life has been the 



124 Studies in Conduct. 

greatest failure need never despair of being able to 
compare his character favourably with that of men 
who have attained the most marked success. A 
judicious modification of their excellences, and an 
exaggeration of their opportunities, combined with 
a candid but discreet avowal of his own faults and 
a modest statement of his capacities, are an in- 
imitable method for getting up an artificial self- 
esteem. Except, however, by reference to a tran- 
scendental and preter-human standard, the lives of 
most people cannot be fairly described as failures. 
Nobody makes the very best imaginable use of 
original faculties and external opportunities, it is 
true ; but then only a few make that worst use of 
them which stamps their existence as something 
like a mistake from beginning to end. 

Although in theory everybody would admit that 
the worth of a man depends upon the personal qua- 
lities which he possesses and the use to which he 
has put them, and although, in the second place, 
everybody admits that his account must be made 
with his own life, and not with that of his neigh- 
bour, yet people are constantly disposed not only to 
lay more heavily upon their neighbour any burden 
which may be on his back through no fault of his 
own, but also to take to themselves whatever ad- 
vantage they can get from his tribulation. Even 
while declaiming most vehemently, and as they 
believe most sincerely, against the injustice of such 



Unfair Advantages. 125 

conduct, men who are not on the alert for any lapse 
from a high-minded generosity insensibly get a 
trick of pluming themselves that they have this or 
that petty point of social superiority over another. 
That the disadvantage is in truth no fault of the 
other, and the freedom from it no credit to them- 
selves, are two facts which they affect to recognize, 
but which are, nevertheless, silently passed over 
and hidden away when it is convenient, or when a 
mean humour has a temporary mastery. There is 
a difference between being proud of an adventi- 
tious quality, such as high birth, for instance, on the 
one hand, and falling back upon it, on the other, 
to support your own good opinion of yourself, as 
compared with somebody else who has no ancestors 
to speak of. So if a man has a fortune he has a 
right to be very pleased with his good luck, and 
enjoy to the full all the advantages which it places 
within his reach. But this kind of natural com- 
placency is different from an inclination to turn 
to his fine house and horses and carriages and 
cooks, when he wants to think himself better than 
his friend who has his own way to make, and is 
making it. 

That is to say, advantages which come to a man 
from no merit or achievement of his own may give 
him much and perfectly legitimate pleasure. An 
envious fool, whom spleen has driven to take refuge 
in impracticable first principles, may say that he 



126 Studies in Conduct. 

ought to insist on divesting himself of these un- 
earned goods, and starting fair in the world. Sen- 
sible folks would rightly think ill of any one who 
thus deliberately chose to waste force, without ac- 
quiring any gain. But this enjoyment of advantages 
of birth or rank or wealth for themselves, is one 
thing. To bring oneself to look upon them as being 
just as much merits as if they meant industry and 
ability and perseverance, is another. The first is 
blameless; the second is hateful or contemptible. 
But the rich and the well-born are not the only 
classes who are exposed to this temptation, or who 
give way to it either. The men who, by virtue of 
their good qualities, are pushing their fortunes in 
society are just as eager to seize and make the 
most of any adventitious bit of superiority over 
men who have the same good qualities as them- 
selves, and who are pressing forward in the same 
race. We see this temper in the very earliest 
stage of the race. If, of two clever lads, one beats 
the other in writing elegiacs, or carries off the class 
prize, it is an unspeakable comfort to the defeated 
competitor to be able to stigmatize his rival igno- 
miniously as a day-boy, or to think of him in the 
recesses of his own mind as the son of a shoemaker 
or a tailor. At college, the ambitious man who 
only gets a second is apt to congratulate himself 
very timidly and secretly, and as it were uncon- 
sciously, that his rival, who has got a first, has un- 



Unfair Advantages. 127 

couth manners and wears horridly-made clothes, 
and talks with a brogue. He knows he ought to 
be ashamed of himself, and, unless he is all petti- 
ness, he is ashamed, though the brogue and the 
bad clothes may never become positively disagree- 
able to him. In youth this is less unpardonable 
than in grown-up people. The crowning social 
virtue is Magnanimity, which, among other cha- 
racteristics, includes a capacity of taking a gener- 
ous view of adversaries aud competitors. Anybody 
who has reached five-and-twenty without acquiring 
a habit of vigorously striving to attain this tranquil 
breadth of mind, is in a fair way to become a very 
miserable self-tormentor. Perhaps he may not 
have time to indulge largely in the repeated com- 
parison of himself with his neighbours, but at all 
events he loses that invaluable equanimity which 
belongs to a thoroughly generous spirit. 

Ever so little social intercourse reveals to us the 
existence of plenty of men who are capable of this 
reflection, that somebody is running them very 
close in the race for fame or fortune, but, at all 
events, nobody knows who on earth his father was 
or where he has come from. The pitifulness of 
trying to get a notion of superiority out of such a 
circumstance as this never strikes them. They do 
not think what unutterable pettiness of soul is 
implied in laying hold, for purposes of self-congra- 
tulation, of the fact that one was born before his 



128 Studies in Conduct. 

father and mother were married, and another lives 
on a fortune acquired by a paternal rag and bone 
merchant, and a third has had no chance of acqui- 
ring refined manners. No doubt it is a pity not to 
be born in lawful wedlock and not to be the eldest 
son of a duke; but as either mishap is certainly 
not the fault of the man himself, while the fact of 
having escaped the mishap is as certainly no credit 
to others, what can be feebler than even to think 
of such things when we are, in an injudicious mo- 
ment, trying to compare moral and intellectual 
heights with him? If my friend has the undis- 
puted advantage over me in every other respect — 
in assiduity and vigour and kindliness of temper 
and self-denial — and I can only throw myself on 
the marriage-register or an independent income in 
order to recover my own self- approval and com- 
fortable complacency, then it is an extremely sorry 
and despicable thing to cultivate self-complacency 
in this way. 

There is another kind of unfair advantage, and 
one still more commonly made the very most of by 
people of thin and ungenerous blood. Many men 
break down in some particular part of the course. 
Difficult places, which others do not find at all in- 
surmountable, somehow trip them up and send 
them sprawling. Misconduct or folly may thus 
maim a man, and make him always go rather halt 
in the eyes of his fellows. One cannot blame so- 



Unfair Advantages. ng 

ciety for always being more or less on its guard 
against women who have once been unchaste, or 
men who have once shown themselves capable of a 
dishonest or dishonourable act. But this is quite 
different from a readiness to throw the past fault 
of man or woman into their faces when they are 
pursuing honest and approved courses. Everybody 
sees that this is a sign of a vulgar and uncontrolled 
temper, when two viragos in a low court ransack 
one another's private history to find foul names in 
their infuriated controversy. But, in higher life, 
the shabbiness of running over in the mind all a 
friend's past faults and weaknesses, so that we may 
think well of ourselves who have not sinned in his 
direction, is not always so clearly recognized. We 
do not call him by bad names ; but still, in an in- 
direct manner, we may think that our eye is good 
because his has been evil. The argument is ama- 
zingly indirect, it is true, but it is familiar enough 
to anybody who has ever pondered over the. many 
shifts and subtleties by which men cajole themselves 
into self-satisfaction. They are so eager to reach 
this end as not to be, in ordinary cases, too scru- 
pulous about the means. The satisfaction of gene- 
rosity and manliness, which scorns to measure one- 
self by the mishaps or weak points of less fortunate 
friends, is a great deal finer than the satisfaction 
of a paltry complacency; but the road to the 
former is more difficult. To tread it firmly, a man 

K 



130 Studies in Conduct. 

must have both a certain large and lofty capacity,, 
and perpetual vigilance against the petty inclina- 
tions which are wont to beset even the strongest 
minds. 





XIV. 



DIPLOMACY IN PRIVATE LIFE. 




HE line between tact and artifice, be- 
tween discretion and craftiness, is 
one that is not always easy to define. 
Everybody agrees that an artful na- 
ture is the meanest and most unmanly of all human 
dispositions, just as everybody allows that a person 
of tact is sure to get on in the world, and that he 
deserves the success which he has honestly earned. 
Those who are habitually sour and peevish, or who 
denounce as dishonest and insincere everything but 
blunt, rude, naked truth, may perhaps maintain 
that tact and artfulness are one and the same 
thing, only in the former case with its ugliness 
concealed under a pleasant name. Just as in the 
political world there are certain persons who insist 
that diplomacy is only the art of spinning cobwebs, 
which may give employment to highly- paid spiders 

K 2 



132 Studies in Conduct. 

and catch the sillier sort of flies, but which a plain 
man immediately demolishes with the single flou- 
rish of a broom, so in ordinary social life it is the 
humour of a certain class to disparage anything 
like a roundabout way of approaching a desired 
position. They sneer at tact as a Manchester Ra- 
dical sneers at notes and protocols and ultimatums 
and wranglings about precedence at Court. If you 
want a thing, ask for it. If you have anything to 
say, declare it. If you hold an opinion about any- 
body, be sure to let him or her know it. Life con- 
ducted on these principles would not be exactly a 
bed of roses, and the man who attempted it would 
deserve the fate which befell that cavilling demigod 
who would have it that men, to be perfectly or- 
ganized for society, ought to have windows in their 
breasts, through which all their neighbours might 
see their inmost designs. The reputation of being 
a keen satirist may be very cheaply earned by any 
novelist who chooses to supply his characters with 
those windows which Momus desired, while at the 
same time he takes the precaution of depriving 
them all of the power of seeing through the win- 
dows of their neighbours. He and the reader 
have a kind of divine gift for the time being, and 
enjoy complacent chucklings together over the 
blunderings and blindness of the amiable fools 
wno do not perceive the evil schemes on which 
the people around them are intent. 



Diplomacy in Private Life. 133 

There are thus two views; — one, that everybody 
ought ostentatiously to insist upon undergoing a 
constant inspection of all his intentions and mo- 
tives • and the other, that it is very well for the 
general peace of mankind that no such inspection 
is possible, because all men and women are busily 
engaged in little diplomatic plots and manoeuvres 
for the success of which secrecy is quite essential. 
As usual, there is some truth in each of the con- 
flicting notions. People very often take needless 
pains to cover up their plans and their motives, 
exactly as diplomatists do ; when it would be much 
better both for themselves and for others, and 
would much simplify life, if they went to work 
frankly and openly. And, on the other hand, it 
is evident enough that most of us at one time or 
another indulge in designs which it would be in- 
convenient or even fatal to disclose, and which, 
therefore, are judiciously covered with the cloak 
of diplomatic reserve, or, at all events, are only 
gradually unfolded with all due diplomatic forma- 
lity. Nearly everybody feels, under certain cir- 
cumstances, that the art of dexterously fencing 
with friends and enemies alike has its value. One 
does not at every juncture feel a call either to 
clasp a friend to one's bosom, or to run an enemy 
through the body and leave him dead on the 
ground. To be able to keep a neat guard against 
the affectionate but unseasonable importunities of 



134 Studies in Conduct. 

the one, as well as against the ill-natured assaults 
of the other, is a gift which is frequently of the 
highest value even to the most guileless and least 
deceitful of men. The forms of social diplomacy, 
then, have their uses in every sort of intercourse, 
whether with friends, with enemies, or with that 
huge majority who can only be classed as neutrals. 
In other words, in every social relation it is good 
to observe a measure of reserve, and not too has- 
tily to discard stately usages, because they may be 
called pompous, and a decent ceremoniousness, 
because it appears hollow and meaningless. 

A cynic, or a boisterous lover of what he barba- 
rously styles naturalism, may exclaim against the 
folly of a number of elderly gentlemen sitting 
round a table with the object of settling great 
questions, and each of them doing his best to con- 
ceal the true aim which is at his heart under a 
cloud of courteous and long-winded forms. This, 
says the one, is a fine illustration on a large scale, 
and with very conspicuous actors, of the irony of 
life. You are all going through the world saying 
one thing and meaning another, hiding hatreds 
under seemly phrases, gilding a profound indiffer- 
ence with the graceful pretences of friendship, and 
each one steadily pursuing his particular selfish aim 
on affected principles of justice and honour. After 
all, if we concede to our pleasant interlocutor that 
all mankind are thus knavish and hypocritical, 



Diplomacy in Private Life. 135 

an admirable case might still be made out for the 
recourse to forms and ceremonies which hide any- 
thing so repulsive and ugly as this state of feeling. 
But the position is scarcely worth disputing. It 
would be a cruelty to rob anybody who occupies it 
of the heartfelt solace which it must give him in 
all his dealings with his kind. He at least knows 
that he is never taken in by the demonstrations of 
kindness and good- will and self-denial pretentiously 
made by his rascally neighbours. The idea that 
form is only another way of writing fraud, and that 
everybody who is not blunt and rude is insincere, 
is so truly gratifying, that no one who has suffered 
himself to be lapped in such a delusion would 
thank one for awaking him. 

But people who do not yield to this overdone 
nonsense about the irony of life very often have a 
modified notion that it is not quite right to prac- 
tise those little managements which consist in keep- 
ing back this, and bringing into a rather stronger 
light that, and putting a touch of artificial colour 
into the other. They are prone to conceive that 
decoration and contrivance turn life into some- 
thing too like a stage-play. Existence is, they 
say, too serious a matter for people to put rouge 
on their cheeks, and wear theatrical periwigs, and 
discourse in sesquipedalian talk. This, however, 
is to overlook the true difference between a play- 
actor and a diplomatist. The latter does not pre- 



136 Studies in Conduct. 

tend to be somebody else, other than the person he 
really is. He only keeps back a part of his mind or 
intention. Civilized nations find many advantages 
in covering up the greater part of the human frame, 
but they are not on that account abused for being 
theatrical and artificial ; nor is it usual to assume 
that clothing is a device resorted to in order to con- 
ceal physical deformities. Surely it is as unjust 
to suspect every man who does not wear his heart 
upon his sleeve of being a crafty villain. 

The marks of a good diplomatist have been held 
to include an agreeable address, an art of winning 
confidence, the knack of catching the tone of any 
given society. In the transactions of private life 
all these qualities seem to be summed up in the 
word "tact." It has been observed by a great 
historian that diplomatists, as a class, have not 
been distinguished for " generous enthusiasm or 
austere rectitude." And among social diploma- 
tists equally, perhaps, one might observe the same 
absence of these distinctions. But then not only 
among professional diplomatists, but among the 
whole run of mankind, the virtues of generous en- 
thusiasm and austere rectitude are exceptional, and 
not universal, characteristics. Are haberdashers 
or lawyers or parsons or tailors conspicuous, as 
classes, for their generous enthusiasm and austere 
rectitude ? This is only an illustration of a very 
common tendency to snub the minor virtues sim- 



Diplomacy in Private Life. 137 

ply because they are not the greatest, or do not 
drag the greatest in their train. A vulgar mind 
refuses to believe that these skilful diplomatists, 
the men of tact and popularity, who play their 
cards well, are sincere, and is glad to think they 
are devoid of the sublimer sort of good qualities, 
on exactly the same principle as that which makes 
him incredulous that a man of vivacious manner 
and keen interests in a multitude of things can be 
a good scholar or a person of erudition. If a man 
is only a morose and scowling pedant, people of 
this stamp are willing to believe anything you like 
to tell them of his profound attainments. 

It is a great comfort to be thus able to fall hea- 
vily upon a little virtue by talking of a very big one. 
The possession of pleasant diplomatic manners and 
the knack of being all things to all men, of course 
within honest bounds, can be made to appear very 
small affairs indeed if you begin to measure the 
possessor by the standard of Joan of Arc or So- 
crates; and, in doing this very thing, you have 
raised yourself to a great height in the diplomatic 
art, but on its meanest and ugliest side. The truth 
is, the grander virtues are only available on grand 
occasions. One cannot be generously enthusiastic 
every day of one's life. Neither does every ima- 
ginable position or every possible topic give room 
for an exhibition of austere rectitude. But there 
is no part or detail of a man's conduct which is 



138 Studies in Conduct. 

not affected by his view of the use and lawfulness 
of social diplomacy, which, after all, is only another 
name for the discreet and successful management 
of his everyday relations with the world. "If/' 
to borrow the language of Sir Thomas More, 
" when one of Plautus's comedies is en the stage, 
and a company of servants are acting their parts, 
you should come out in the garb of a philosopher, 
and repeat out of Octavia a discourse of Seneca's 
to Nero, had it not been better for you to have 
said nothing than, by mixing things of such dif- 
ferent nature, to have made such an impertinent 
tragi-comedy ?" Put in this way, there is not 
much doubt as to the answer which even the most 
blind and unintelligent of men would return. It 
certainly would be better to have said nothing. 

But those who are all against diplomatic fencing, 
and diplomatic address and tact, would of course 
object very strenuously to all comparison of life 
with a comedy. We ought to be clad in the garb 
of philosophers, and to repeat only philosophic dis- 
courses. The only reply to this is, that we are 
not all strung up to the high philosophic pitch. 
Horace Walpole said that life, though a tragedy to 
those who feel, is a comedy to those who think. 
This is true at least of the ordinary superficial in- 
tercourse of man. It is preposterous to growl and 
grumble because they seem to be playing at cross- 
purposes with one another, and getting themselves 



Diplomacy in Private Life. 139 

into all sorts of fixes and scrapes, and making a 
way out of them by clever tricks and crafty de- 
vices which do not quite square with the very sub- 
limest first principles. We may wish very sincerely 
that people would desist from getting into fixes in 
their relations with others. It would be ever so 
much better for them, ever so much better for the 
world too, if they followed steady philosophic pre- 
cepts. Only, as they do not, we must take them 
and the world as we find them. 

Women are universally admitted to be the 
adroitest masters of the diplomatic art. They 
play the part in the comedy of modern life which 
was allotted in the drama of less civilized ages to 
Davus and to Syrus, and they play it much better. 
The heroine of ' Vanity Fair ; is more entertaining 
than Davus or Syrus, because she works naturally 
and easily, and without resorting to the coarse ex- 
pedients of lying, or stealing, or worse. All is ef- 
fected by real finesse ; and, above everything, wo- 
men are perfect in what has been justly called the 
most subtle of all forms of finesse — " de savoir 
bien feindre de tomber dans les pieges qu'on nous 
tend." The skill of the diplomatist can go no 
further than this. Whether it is artifice or tact is 
one of those nice questions which it is perhaps not 
consistent with the rules of gallantry to examine 
too closely. 




XV. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOUR GRAPES. 




HERE is nothing better or loftier," 
Cicero declared, " than to despise 
wealth if you do not possess it." The 
more modern philosopher would tell 
us that it is a great deal better and loftier to de- 
spise wealth if you do possess it. Hume, for ex- 
ample, was much more candid and better worth 
listening to when he confessed that, though in me- 
lancholy moments he consoled himself by " peevish 
reflections on the vanity of the world and all human 
glory," still he had found that such sentiments can 
never be sincere except in those who possess what 
they protest that they despise. Some popular sen- 
timent is still perhaps on Cicero's side. If people 
have not got what is commonly held a desirable 
thing, such as riches or reputation or position, they 
may easily get into a way of thinking all the better 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 141 

of themselves for being without what the vulgar 
herd of their neighbours value so highly. And 
their neighbours are not seldom taken in by this 
affectation of a genuine contentment with humble 
fortunes. The world at large is mostly too busy 
to take much pains accurately to gauge any one 
man's pretensions to be a philosopher or to test 
very closely the sincerity of any philosophic creed 
which he chooses to profess. If he avows that he 
would as lief live in a tub as in a palace, and avows 
it often enough and vehemently enough, and if he 
is never detected in any assiduous effort to get into 
a more stylish and more commodious tub, people 
take him at his word, and believe that here is one 
man at least who has seen through the vanities of 
life. It might occur to a Machiavellian mind that 
there is a touch of policy in the encouragement we 
give to folk who despise riches and glory. Those 
who are shortening their days in the headlong 
chase after the world's prizes are not sorry — so it 
may seem to the Machiavellian mind — to watch 
competitors drop aside, vowing that the prizes are 
not worth the trouble of winning. We feign to 
agree with them, and pretend that they almost 
persuade us to be philosophers, and then we push 
on more ardently than ever. But selfish craft of 
this sort is not enough to explain the reverence 
with which ordinary persons are ready to regard 
almost anybody who gives himself the air of look- 



142 Studies in Conduct, 

ing down upon what other people like and pursue. 
Though in one sense the world hates any dissent 
from prevalent usage, yet in another it is willing 
to tolerate or even adore any dissentient whose 
eccentricity only takes a passive or negative form. 
Provided he does not actively fly in the faces of his 
neighbours, or want them to do something which 
they have not been accustomed and are not in- 
clined to do, then he may amuse himself by de- 
spising them as bitterly as he chooses. The world 
in the abstract rather likes being despised. No 
novelist or preacher is so popular as one who never 
tires of telling us what baubles and gewgaws we 
all spend our butterfly lives in chasing. Reflec- 
tions about gewgaws breed a sort of reckless reac- 
tion. A man who is too deeply convinced that life 
is all vanity, and that he is only an ephemeral in- 
sect fluttering in the light of the sun until the 
evening, soon begins to feel rather hilarious on the 
strength of this theory, and resolves at all events 
to gather rosebuds while he may. The more you 
preach to him that life is a bubble, the less reason 
does he discover for not making things as lively as 
he can. 

In spite of the respect that too simple persons 
are in the habit of paying to stoical professions 
of contempt for ordinary aims and pursuits, such 
professions are nearly always as artificial as they 
were in Cicero's own case. Contempt for money, 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 143 

for instance, is constantly found to be only a fine 
name for being too indolent to earn it, or too ex- 
travagant to keep it. There are plenty of people, 
happily, who know that there are many of the 
highest goods in life which the possession of money 
is utterly powerless to secure. But this is very 
different from the folly of ignoring that there are 
some of the highest goods in life which can be 
secured by nothing but money. It is quite true 
that the anguish of bereavement or the miseries of 
ill health cannot be allayed by ever so much wealth. 
But, on the other hand, it is just -as true that 
poverty is very apt to be fatal to independence, and 
that it is certainly fatal to most of those graces 
and dignities which are not indispensable to virtue, 
but are indispensable for making the most of cha- 
racter. To despise money "if you have not got 
it/' and to abstain in consequence from trying to 
get any, is to despise a great number of admitted 
good things, and to despise the power of imparting 
any of these admitted good things to other people. 
If you have tasted the grapes and spat them out 
again, people may believe your assertion that they 
are sour. Otherwise they would be justified in 
thinking more commonly than they do that such 
assertions are the mark of a fool, not of a philo- 
sopher. 

And it is just the same with all the other objects 
which the affected Stoic pretends to condemn. The 



144 Studies in Conduct. 

bubble reputation, whether sought at the camion's 
mouth, or at the mouth of the inkpot, or out of 
one's own mouth, does not guarantee the success- 
ful soldier or writer or orator absolute ease of 
mind. The more famous he grows, the more vigo- 
rously he will be bullied and snubbed. But to 
pretend to think little of fame is to think little of 
a motive which has produced the greatest and most 
beneficent achievements that have made the globe 
as decently inhabitable as it is. It is all very well 
for irresolute Hamlets to grow melancholy over 
the fate of imperial Caesar, stopping a hole to keep 
the wind away, and for truculent Juvenals to laugh 
grimly over the great orator supplying a subject 
for school recitations. And fame is a very perish- 
able, and most likely not a very comfortable, thing. 
Only, if wise men ail became philosophers, and 
determined to content themselves with listless ir- 
resolution or with truculence, and to leave fame 
for fools., it is obvious that the stock of happiness 
in the world would soon suffer a grave diminution. 
Paradoxical as it may seem, there is good reason 
for believing that the spread of the sour-grape phi- 
losophy, among young men especially, has been in 
some measure a result of the greater accessibility 
of grapes in our time. When so many of the prizes 
of life were out of the reach of the majority, and 
were only to be gained by members of exclusive 
sets, the outsiders could afford to admit that they 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 145 

were prizes, and that they were worth having. But 
the advance of the democratic spirit has thrown 
every post, from Irish constable to Prime Minister, 
more or less open. The old barriers are being 
broken down. When a man sees Mr. Disraeli 
leading one party, and Mr. Gladstone the other, he 
cannot say that either ancient birth or unbounded 
wealth is absolutely essential to public success. 
And so in other careers. If a man has brains and 
health and a decently early start in the world, 
there is no external clog to prevent him from rising 
as high as he likes. There is nothing in the con- 
stitution of society to hinder an educated man 
from getting whatever praise or pudding his own 
qualities and conduct entitle him to. But then it 
is not everybody who cares to subject his powers 
to that exercise, and his conduct to that discipline, 
which are among the conditions of success. In 
older times a man indisposed to exertion and self- 
denial might excuse himself by thinking that, if 
he tried ever so hard, he w r ould still be excluded 
from his reward by the evil system on which prizes 
were distributed. Lazy and self-indulgent men 
can no longer throw themselves on this happy pre- 
text. It is their own fault if they do not make 
any mark they are capable of making. So they 
are constrained to take up with a new doctrine; 
and the one which best suits their conceit and their 
indolence at the same time is to maintain that 

L 



146 Studies in Conduct. 

there is no good in making marks. The cotton- 
spinner who toils to make money, the barrister 
who toils in order to sit on the bench or the wool- 
sack, the writer who toils either to enforce his ideas 
or to win fame or to do both, are all alike pitied 
as men burning their candles for a stake which is 
not worth such an outlay. The grapes, though 
more accessible in one respect, are even more inac- 
cessible than ever to those who would like them, 
but are not prepared to pay the price in labour and 
perseverance and self-denial. 

To measure how intensely artificial and insin- 
cere is this theory of the worthlessness of what 
most people think desirable things, it is only ne- 
cessary to look at the aims which it is proposed to 
substitute in their place. It is a pitiful thing, one 
may admit, that a man should devote his life to 
arranging taxes for the British public, or to draw- 
ing bills and petitions and answers and pleadings 
and demurrers, or to writing learned books which 
only a few hundred people ever care for, or even 
hear about. We can quite imagine an order of 
beings to whom an existence of any of these kinds 
would be utterly mean and intolerable. There 
may be celestials who are justified in looking with 
pity and contempt upon a mortal who wears his 
mental faculties out in order to be able to sit on 
an uncomfortable red sofa in the House of Lords, 
.and to preside over a few other mortals most of 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 14.J 

whom had only very scanty mental faculties to 
wear out. It is possible that in another sphere a 
man puzzling himself why apples fall, and why the 
planets keep in their places, presents but a poor 
spectacle, and we may then " show a Newton as 
we show an ape." But meanwhile one must mea- 
sure things by such standards as there are. To 
estimate the worth of the objects which vulgar 
mortals pass their lives in seeking, it is well to 
consider how much better and nobler and loftier 
an existence is led by the philosophers who insist 
that all the grapes that we can gather on our sys- 
tem are sour and tasteless. If vulgar motives of 
ambition lead a man so short a way on the path to 
happiness and a worthy life, how much better off is 
the man who sees through all the vulgar moonshine, 
and knows there is nothing in it ? How much better 
off is the man who, not having money, despises it, 
and who, not having earned any distinction or re- 
putation, thinks himself quite as fortunate and as 
admirable without it ? One finds oneself in the 
world with a certain stock of faculties and oppor- 
tunities, and one must do something with them — 
to pass the time, say, if nothing else. If a man 
is not making money, or making discoveries, or 
writing books, or leading the House of Commons — 
all poor work enough for angels and seraphs, we 
dare say, — he must still be doing something or 
other. What do our modern epicureans suggest ? 

L 2 



148 Studies in Conduct. 

As might be expected, their answers to this funda- 
mental question are very various. Like all other 
sects, they are split up into an infinite number of 
subdivisions. But their great common and dis- 
tinctive principle is dawdling. This is the key- 
stone of their system, the ground on which they 
all meet, and from which all their ramifications of 
detail may be traced. Some prefer one form of 
dawdling, while others like another form. The 
more respectable of them are fond of books, and 
lounge through life in an easy chair, reading ; but 
to take the trouble to digest what they read, to get 
out of it a coherent set of ideas and principles, so 
as to enable them to cut a better figure in the 
world or to have something to impart to the world, 
would be to fall in with the stupid and vulgar pre- 
judices on the subject. A man with an active in- 
terest in ideas, and who works hard to enforce 
them, is the victim of a common delusion. What 
has the world done for him, or what will it do, that 
he should worry himself about ideas for it ? Oc- 
casionally, this easy lounging through books is ac- 
companied by a taste for music and painting, and 
the man with all this finds existence very tolerable. 
Others are content to spend their time in travel- 
ling, and picking up little odds and ends of notions 
about the manners and customs and politics of 
Continental countries. A third set go in for plea- 
sure, pure and simple, without a pretence of pick- 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 149 

ing up odds and ends of notions about anything. 
It would be absurd to use hard names about these 
and the other varieties of the philosophical loafer. 
They like their own mode of life, and it is in the 
main an elegant way of passing the time, though 
one cannot help thinking that forty or fifty years 
of it must contain a few uncommonly dull mo- 
ments. We cannot blame the fox for being a fox, 
and we need not deny that there is room for ele- 
gant loafers in the economy of nature. But there 
can be no injustice in protesting that all grapes 
are not sour because they are out of the fox's 
reach, and that the world's prizes are not all ut- 
terly worthless and unsatisfactory because the 
loafer does not care to go through the hard work 
that is necessary in order to get them. True, a 
great professional reputation, or a good position in 
Parliament, or the fame of having written a good 
book, is vanity and vexation of spirit ; but is not 
dawdling, with ever so fine a name given to it, 
vanity and vexation of spirit equally ? The re- 
sults of hard work may prove to be a bubble, 
only this does not show that laziness and mental 
inactivity and a careful repression of enthusiasm 
for things which the rest of the world is in- 
terested in are anything better than the bubble, 
after all. 

Horace Walpole was a splendid example of the 
creature who, in Macaulay's words, " thinks fit to 



150 Studies in Conduct. 

dignify with the name of philosophy his busy idle- 
ness^ his indifference to matters which the world 
generally regards as important, his passion for 
trifles." " It was owing to the particular elevation 
of his character that he cared about a pinnacle of 
lath and plaster more than about the Middlesex 
Election, and about a miniature of Grammont than 
about the American Revolution." The pretended 
equanimity with which some persons talk about 
public affairs now is just as sheer and vile an affec- 
tation in them as it was in Horace Walpole. 

A measure for reforming the representation or 
reducing the National Debt, or a vote of want 
of confidence in a Ministry, may be very trifling 
affairs if we look down the long vista of human 
history ; but still they are better worth seriously 
thinking about for half a day than the question, 
whether the Club cook was as successful in the 
white sauce last night as he had been two nights 
before, or whether the claret at eight-and-sixpence 
is worth the difference in price over the claret at 
seven-and-sixpence. Politics may be vanity, but 
then so is white sauce ; and if you come to mea- 
sure vanities, perhaps the white sauce is the vainer 
and more fleeting of the two. There are few pre- 
valent hypocrisies so utterly despicable as that 
which allows a man, because he cares for his din- 
ner or his books or his own personal comfort, and 
does not care for large public interests, to assume 



The Philosophy of Sour Grapes. 151 

the airs of the even-minded philosopher. Let him 
be as lazy and as selfish as he chooses, but it is too 
intolerable to hear him impudently declaring that 
the objects which make other men refuse to be lazy 
and selfish are all hollow and insipid. 




XVI. 



INTELLECTUAL VIGOUR. 



pps 




8 



j|T is no new remark that, among intel- 
lectual as among moral virtues, there 
is a constant tendency to allow the 
cultivation of one good quality to 
edge out another or a set of other good qualities. 
But, though not new, this is a truth much more 
commonly lost sight of in connection with intellect 
than it is in reference to conduct, and for a reason 
which may be pretty easily discovered. If a man 
sacrifices one virtue in conduct for the sake of 
another, instead of maintaining a just balance 
between them, the consequence is so plainly visible, 
both to himself and his neighbours, that he is 
speedily pulled up ; or, if he chooses to persevere 
with his one-sided virtue, at least he does so deli- 
berately and with preference. The consequences 
of purely intellectual habits are subtler, and less on 



Intellectual Vigour. 153 

the surface. Even reflecting men may fall into 
very vicious intellectual states, and remain in them 
perhaps for a whole lifetime, without ever finding 
out how much injury they have suffered from en- 
couraging an excess of one good quality and per- 
mitting a defect of another. The comparative 
secrecy and invisibleness of the growth of intellec- 
tual habits makes it so much the more difficult to 
preserve the proper balance among them. While 
we cultivate an assiduous attention to accuracy 
and completeness of detail, we may be losing the 
faculty for grouping details under principles ; and, 
on the other hand, an unguarded passion for gene- 
ral principles is always ready to betray us into 
a flashy misinterpretation of particular circum- 
stances. The development of imagination and of 
a love of beauty constantly overruns the capacity 
of appreciating or valuing scientific truth, just as 
exclusive attention to the scientific side of things, 
if unwatched, tends to deaden all sensibility to 
the poetic side. There is a host of other contend- 
ing virtues of this kind, each of which is ready to 
elbow out its contradictory, or rather its comple- 
mentary, virtue. The injury which comes of al- 
lowing either to gain a definite victory over the 
other may be seen in the history of nearly every 
subject which has engaged the human mind. The 
comparatively slow progress made in history pro- 
per is due chiefly to the repugnance entertained 



154 Studies in Conduct, 

by the men of detail to generalizing their facts, 
and by the men of generalization to accurate and 
wide verification of their principles. The feeble- 
ness and windiness of bad poets is commonly to 
be traced to their reluctance to prop up their 
minds on the side of facts and observation and 
learning. On the other hand, even the most pe- 
dantic followers of physical science now admit 
that some of the most brilliant discoveries would 
never have been made if the discoverers had not 
been guided by the light of a poetic, half-fastastic 
imagination. 

But there is a special complaint, in our own 
time, that the culture of the admirable group of 
intellectual virtues which may be comprehended 
in the name of tolerance, or impartiality, or sym- 
pathy, is being allowed to drain off the sources of 
the no less admirable virtue of conviction or ear- 
nestness. What men gain in many-sidedness, it 
is said, they are losing in vigour. They are so 
anxious to do justice to the ideas of everybody 
else that they have no strength left, or inclination 
either, to grasp and hold a set of ideas for them- 
selves. That this is a natural tendency of the 
philosophic doctrine of toleration in the case of 
very weak or very rash minds is pretty certain. 
But then the people would have been worse but 
for this doctrine, because the weakest and rashest 
sympathy with every possible opinion all round is 



Intellectual Vigour. 13- 

not so bad as a similarly weak and rash intole- 
rance. Considering the strong probability there is 
in favour of the opinions which a man holds in- 
tolerantly being wrong and false opinions, it is 
better that he should veer about among a variety 
of views than that he should only be able to stick 
to one on condition of hating and despising all 
others, past, present, or to come. It is a great 
pity that so many people should insist upon being 
weak; but, so long as weak minds continue to ap- 
pear in the world, it is better that their weakness 
should take the form of being sure about nothing 
than the form of being positively sure of only one 
thing — namelv, that evervbodv who does not think 
exactly as they think must certainly be wrong. If 
assured conviction is only to be purchased at this 
price most people would agree that it is too dear. 

But the assailants of the prevailing temper of 
the day insist that it is not only the feeble but the 
stern characters, too, who have had their capacity 
for true and vigorous thinking impaired and ener- 
vated. It is not only the whimsical fools that 
think everything by turns and nothing long. On 
the contrary, men whose intelligence and sincerity 
and industry in the search for truth you would 
otherwise rate at the very highest, are as fatally 
paralysed as their less elevated neighbours, by the 
doctrine that there must be some germ of truth 
in everything that can be said or thought. There 



156 Studies in Conduct. 

is something to be urged in support of this very 
uncomfortable theory about us all, but, before see- 
ing how much it amounts to, it may be worth 
while to look at one or two considerations which 
go some way both to account for and to overthrow 
the theory. 

First of all, a great many persons confound the 
doctrine that there is some truth in everything 
with the doctrine that there is no truth in any- 
thing. It has been very convenient for superficial 
people who are too careless and too little elevated 
in character to take the trouble to have any con- 
victions, to pretend that the latter proposition is a 
corollary from the former. It is not the first time 
by many that a philosophic doctrine has been dis- 
torted into a pretext for indolence. When half- 
hearted people get tired of hunting after truth all 
over the world of opinion, of balancing and dis- 
criminating and modifying, it is a great relief to 
be able to give it all up with a conviction that 
there is nothing in it, and that, except for pur- 
poses of argument and light social disputation, 
you may just as well take one side as another, 
because there is no substantial truth in either. 
Free and easy Pyrrhonism of this sort is not the 
product of any eclectic theory about truth, but 
simply the form accidentally imposed on common- 
place selfishness and apathy. 

Secondly, people are apt to conclude that we 



Intellectual Vigour. 157 

are not so much in earnest now as men used to be, 
because those who differ from one another do not 
employ so much scorching and scathing bad lan- 
guage. The modern controversialist does not, as 
Warburton did habitually, accuse his opponent 
of vile prevarication, of monstrous and shameless 
lying, of wallowing in the slime of misrepresen- 
tation and falsehood, nor does he speak or even 
think of him as a " scrub," a " rogue," a " beg- 
garly impostor." Nobody with any self-respect 
would now permit himself to say even of the most 
audacious thinker, as Johnson roared out of Hume, 
"that he had just enough light to light him to 
hell." Even bishops are forced, by the public opi- 
nion of the age, to put the matter rather more de- 
licately than this. Byron called Southey " an ar- 
rogant scribbler of all work," and Southey spoke 
of the Edinburgh Reviewer as having "stripped 
bare his pitiful malevolence, and exhibited it in 
his bald, wicked, and undisguised deformity." We 
have, it is true, recently witnessed a revival of this 
style in the outrageous and thoroughly discredit- 
able violence of the clamour against an unpopu- 
lar politician. But the disrepute into w r hich such 
violence brought the w r riters and orators who re- 
sorted to it is a sign how much milder we are be- 
come. It is rather hard to argue that a philosopher 
is wanting in vigour because he tranquilly takes 
his adversary's reasoning to pieces and shows how 



158 Studies in Conduct. 

little it is worth, instead of railing at him and 
calling him a scrub and a rogue and a vile preva- 
ricator, and vowing that he has just got cleverness 
enough to find the quickest way to hell. The fal- 
lacy, however, of inferring depth of conviction 
from violent and heated language scarcely needs 
examining. Only there are people who seriously 
think that we are less earnest than our fathers 
because we do not grow so bitter and ferocious 
over our disputes, just as there are others who con- 
sider the preference of claret to " comet" port, 
mostly so styled from its fiery and destructive pro- 
perties, a clear symptom of national degeneracy. 

A third mistake, which is rather less obvious 
than this, is to infer a decay of intellectual vi- 
gour from the fact that men are beginning, not 
only to have less decided opinions on any sub- 
ject, but to admit that there are fewer subjects 
on which they have any opinions at all. It is 
true that there are more gaps in the circle of an 
ordinarily educated man's knowledge than there 
used to be. There are whole sciences of which he 
cannot choose but remain in ignorance. One mind 
is no longer able to keep pace with the advance of 
all minds. When there was only little to be learnt, 
a man might know something of every subject. 
But the circle of subjects is being indefinitely 
widened every day, as well as each subject pushed 
indefinitely further than was possible with the old 



Intellectual Vigour. 159 

methods and apparatus of reasoning. It is the 
vast increase of intellectual vigour and strength, 
not its decay, which makes it impossible for any one 
man to possess so many sets of opinions as he might 
have done when the list of the objects of intellec- 
tual interest and inquiry was so very much shorter. 
Yet for all this, in spite of much that is un- 
reasonable in the talk about our own times, it may 
be confessed that there is a sense in which we may 
be said to be wanting in robustness of thought; 
and if the charge is only not exaggerated, and if 
we are only not asked to revert to some dead and 
buried modes of thought, instead of developing 
modes with new vitality in them, nothing can be 
better worth thinking about, The worst of con- 
fessing that the spirit of the age has its faults is 
that, the very moment you have made the con- 
fession, you are seized violently by a zealot at 
either arm, the one insisting on dragging you back 
to the ideas which were good enough for departed 
grandfathers and therefore are surety good enough 
for you, the other pulling you forward to an in- 
stantaneous and unimpeachable millennium which 
you have no more desire to attain than a bad little 
boy has to go to heaven. The sense in which 
thinkers and writers may perhaps be held to be 
less robust than is desirable gives no countenance 
to the notion that a recurrence to obsolete ideas 
of theology, politics, or education would make 



i6o Studies in Conduct, 

things any better. Whatever remedy may be 
found effective will rather be the modification of 
one set of new ideas by another than any revival 
of expired fashions of mental culture. But a cer- 
tain lack of direct momentum exists in modern 
opinion. The vacillations, for example, in the 
minds of some of the best-educated men on the 
subject of democratic government, and the flux 
and reflux of the same man ; s opinions as to the 
province of reason in religious inquiry, are two 
illustrations in the largest fields of the fact that, in 
the most highly-trained minds, opinion is like some 
abnormal pendulum perpetually oscillating to pre- 
cisely the same distances on either side of the line, 
and never approximating any nearer to a state of 
rest midway. Perhaps a more fitting simile would 
be that of a bird hopping abruptly from twig to 
twig. Alternate disgusts with the conduct of the 
uneducated crowd and with the theory of an oli- 
garchic government, with the excessive pretensions 
of authority and the excessive pretensions of pure 
reason, distract the mind, and send the wretched 
victim from one pole to the other with ceaseless 
activity. Convictions seem in such cases to be 
destitute of that momentum without which they 
are worth little, and which would make men eager 
to seize any opportunity of enforcing them. But 
this unfruitful timidity is probably the effect of 
another cause besides the extreme willingness to 



Intellectual Vigour. 161 

see some good in every side. It may spring just 
as often from an extreme conscientiousness. Any- 
body who does not much care whether what he 
believes is the truth or not may very soon reach 
an edifying strength of conviction. But men who 
have taught themselves that the truth of a belief 
is the most important thing about it are naturally 
less ready to pick up an opinion anyhow, and then 
to stick to it as if they had come by it in the most 
legitimate way in the world. The over-conscien- 
tious lose their nerve and firmness for the same 
reason that the surgeon was in danger of losing 
his nerve when he had to attend the wife of Napo* 
leon. The consequences of making a blunder ap- 
pear too overwhelming. Reverence of this sort 
for truth does as much harm to its object as the 
surgeon's reverence for majesty might have done 
to the Empress. 

Another very common source of the deficient 
vigour of which people complain in much modern 
thought and literature is the assiduous attention 
which it is the fashion to pay to refinement of 
taste. A man cannot call his opponent a scrub 
now, even if he thinks him one ; and if the cur- 
tailment of choice epithets of this kind were the 
only consequence, one would not deplore it. But 
a too fastidious refinement has had the more mis- 
chievous effect of checking that freshness which 
belongs to ideas that are presented to us straight 

M 



[6a Studies in Conduct. 

as they conic from the soil. The too refined man 
is so anxious to dress his ideas in what may he 
called a company garb that he robs them of nearly 
all that is most characteristic and racy about them. 
Hence the just complaint about so mnch modern 
writing*, that it has no backbone in it; leaving the 
order of vertebrates, it has sunk down to lower 
classes, among mere molluscs and jelly-fish and 
other flabby organizations. Authors with too 
mnch concern for polish are like wrestlers who 
should devote their minds to the cut of their 
clothes, and only give a fragment of attention to 
their thews and sinews. Even Macaulay's style is 
considered too rude and downright by some who 
think that a poor idea delicately expressed is a 
more admirable thing than a pregnant idea just 
roughly thrown out as it sprang up in the mind. 
Overdone verse-writing in early youth may have 
something to do with this squcamishncss, which 
makes an elegant outside the chief thing, and the 
soundness and substance of the kernel only se- 
condary. Still it would be rash to assume that 
all that is given to taste is so much taken away 
from that capacity of straightforward and robust 
judgment in the world of ideas which is one of the 
most excellent of intellectual qualities. To lose 
hold of vigorous habits of thought in the pursuit 
either of some ideal goddess of truth or of a fin- 
nicking tastefulness, is to impair the balance of 



I ■ 

jost fetal way. 
> be dispensed with of all those virtues 
of understanding which, along with certai u virtues 

perfect and full flower of human char* 
is so, because conduct, which is the ultimate I 
of the worth of all thinking, is sure to become 
weak and wavering in proportion to the falHng-off 
of this internal vigour. 






-V - 




XVII. 



MENTAL RIPENESS. 




j|T is a matter of very common observa- 
tion that men are wont to give up 
their game of life too easily, or, to put 
it in another way, to lower their aims 
and choose the less worthy prizes after an insuf- 
ficient essay to reach the higher objects which at 
first, and justly, they thought best worth having. 
They are too willing to think that their character 
has crystallized, that they have somehow found 
their way into a groove which their age and cir- 
cumstances forbid them to exchange for another. 
In this sense men are always inclined to fancy them- 
selves older than they are, and every year is, not 
without a certain feeling of relief, made to count 
for two. A man of five-and-thirty, looking at the 
chances of his animal life, commonly takes a cheer- 
ful and expansive view of the future in that respect, 



Mental Ripeness. 165 

but if you discourse to him upon higher moral pur- 
pose, wider intellectual sympathies, new and varied 
pursuits, he replies as if the book of his life were 
instantly on the point of being sealed and made up. 
The opportunity of adding new pages he holds to 
be for ever vanished. Sighing, "Ah, si jeunesse 
savait" he tacitly surrenders his earlier aspirations, 
content, as he says, to renew them in his children, 
or forced, as he thinks, by compulsion of circum- 
stance, to bend his mind to the grosser but more 
urgent needs of daily life, and so to allow the old 
flame to go flickering out. Even upon uncultivated 
persons the conviction has a very evil influence, 
that it is too late to take any trouble about extend- 
ing the mental outlook any time after the first days 
of youth. But it is among the comparatively few 
cultivated people that the mischief is greatest of 
supposing that one has got too far on in life, too 
firmly set in certain paths, to make any change, or 
to attempt new courses. Those whose aspirations 
would be most likely to run in a direction that 
would instruct and delight their fellows are just 
those whom indolence or diffidence constantly 
tempts to think themselves too old to make any 
deliberate effort to realize their dreams. 

And friends not seldom fancy they are playing the 
friendliest part by pouring. into a man's ear warnings 
that the cobbler should stick to his last, that by 
attempting too much he will do nothing, that what 



1 66 Studies in Conduct. 

might have been well if begun early cannot be other 
than ill when begun later, with a thousand other 
terse and specious forms of the doctrine — which 
may be good in matters of belief, but is certainly 
not good in matters of conduct — that you should 
never interfere with a quiet status quo. One would 
suppose that youth was not only the seed-time, but 
the chief season for harvest as well, and that, as far 
as ideas and hopes are concerned, there is no more 
growth, no further ripening and mellowing. We 
often discover this gross fallacy in talk about lite- 
rature, and especially about the more imaginative 
kinds of literature. 

The common theory among superficial persons 
appears to be that the mind gets a distinct set, or 
ply, or twist in youth, and that in this nature means 
it to stay. Choose your subject or your line, they 
say, as early as you can, and then let nothing divert 
you from its single pursuit; just for all the world 
as if expanding and enriching and proving one's 
mind were like keeping a retail shop, or making a 
fortune as a huckster. The gradual development 
of the tastes, the slow growth of those intellectual 
preferences which are sure to come in every cha- 
racter that has any original fertility and is wisely 
tended, are processes for which little allowance is 
made, either by the individual who is eager for the 
result, or by the world at large, which not unnatu- 
rally concerns itself with results only, and scarcely 



Mental Ripeness. 167 

at all with the silent ways and invisible means. 
This slow-climbing patience is particularly hard 
and unwelcome, because the necessity for it comes 
fresh upon men after the easy golden visions of 
youth. Inexperience serves to spread a luminous 
haze over the future, through which all seems 
bright and delightfully accessible, and then, when 
it is proved that they have concealed, not grassy 
slopes, but rocky and toilsome heights, patience 
becomes doubly and trebly hard to practise. The 
poet, in the prologue to c Faust/ looks back with de- 
sire upon the time when he " was still forming/' 
" when he had nothing and yet enough ; the longing 
after truth and the pleasure in delusion." As the 
friendly Merry man reprovingly reminds him, youth 
is very well in dealing with foes, or "when the 
loveliest of lasses cling with ardour round your 
neck ;" but " to strike the familiar lyre with spirit 
and grace, to sweep along with happy wanderings 
towards a self-appointed aim — such is the task your 
ripened age imposes." 

Literature, like much else, suffers heavily at the 
present day from the excess of haste to reach cer- 
tain ends. The modern theory of ripened age is 
that it is the time to sit down and enjoy the fruits 
that have been earned by the crude labours of im- 
mature years. The days of long schooling and 
sedulous preparation are for the present at an end, 
except in rare cases. Most of the poets of the 



1 68 Studies in Conduct. 

rising generation, for instance, and most of the 
novelists of the generation that is, are afraid of their 
imagination fading away before they have had time 
to make the most of it ; or else they feel confident 
that, if they were to study history or philosophy, 
or anything else that demands close attention, they 
would be quenching their inventive faculty. The 
imagination, it seems, will only thrive amid the 
ruins of reason and judgment, and in the nourishing 
air of ignorance, which, elsewhere so pestilent, is 
here oddly enough supposed to be salubrious. In- 
stead of being content with the ordinary laws of 
intellectual as of other kinds of growth — first the 
leaf, then the blossom, then the fruit,— these over- 
hasty souls insist on bursting into full fruitage at 
their first impulse. Suppose they fail a little ; sup- 
pose what they vow to be the richest and ripest the 
world finds only u berries harsh and crude," then it 
is that the world falls into disgrace. The fault is 
with the world that so shamefully insists on know- 
ing nothing of its greatest men, and not at all with 
the too ambitious creatures who insist on writing 
and painting things before they have had any time 
either to weigh the things that are best worth 
writing and painting, or to grasp the mastery of all 
the many ingredients that enter into good work- 
manship. Wiser than these, but still unwise, are 
those others who, though shrewd enough to per- 
ceive that patience and silence and long culture are 



Mental Ripeness. 169 

the invariable antecedents of the best work, too 
recklessly conclude that they do not possess the 
native capacity for patience, and that this is a ca- 
pacity which a man with the cares of the world 
upon him cannot expect to acquire. Men judi- 
ciously think that a recognition of the difficulties 
which stand in the way of an achievement is the 
first condition of overcoming them. So it is, pro- 
vided one does not recognize them with such graphic 
and striking force as to be disheartened from at- 
tempting the achievement altogether. A weak 
diffidence has done the world as much harm as a rash 
confidence, and these are the two points between 
which an unseasoned mind is apt to wander, doing 
nothing except hoping alternately too much and too 
little, feeling itself too great and too small. 

The patience which ripens the mind and fits it 
for many interests and great compositions is no 
inactive waiting for something that will come of 
itself. Poetry is not, as has been humorously 
said, secreted in the duodenum. Passive star- 
gazing, pleasant expectation of the divine afflatus, 
does not ensure any practical result ; and a man 
may look hard into the fire, or up into the heavens, 
or keenly round on his kind, or wherever he seeks 
to woo his own particular Muse, without ever 
getting an idea or an image that is worth the 
trouble of describing or retaining. A state of slow 
but never-staying fermentation, in which every- 



170 Studies in Conduct. 

thing that enters the mind is transformed and as- 
similated, and which is constantly keeping the mind 
exercised in the search after new things, — this is 
the condition of those who have escaped an innate 
lethargy of soul, and who have not allowed the early 
growths of good seed to be choked by the tares of 
excessive worldly business. Not that total immu- 
nity from such business is by any means a desirable 
auxiliary to this ripening process. Some of the 
very best work in the sphere of ideas has been 
done by men habitually occupied in the sphere of 
affairs. But the pressure which chokes the finer 
out-shoots of character is that of the necessities of 
a dependent family, of a traditional kind of desire 
to make a great deal of money, of expensive habits 
which require much merely mercenary labour to pay 
for them. It is the excess of business carried on 
under severe pressure of this or any other external 
kind which is so fatal to a large and serene internal 
activity. For there is all the difference in the world, 
in point of fruitfulness, between this serene activity 
and a vain fussiness or feverish agitation. This is 
one reason among many why the earlier part of 
life is least favourable to all the choicest and highest 
sorts of artistic production. By serenity we do not 
mean necessarily happiness or comfort. A man may 
be serenely miserable, and perhaps this is the mood 
to which the world is indebted for some of those 
works which it would least willingly let die. But 



Mental Ripeness. 171 

sorrowful composure is altogether removed alike 
from the anguish which bites and stings, and from 
the small cares which vex and fret and worry. In 
the earlier years this kind of composure is almost 
impossible, except in the case of the born prig, 
whose emotions and passions were all formed and 
shaped and set in decent order, finally and once for 
all, before he came into a disorderly world. It is 
not till experience and observation have in a mea- 
sure rubbed away from things their exciting new- 
ness that a man is able to ascend the heights of re- 
flection, and view them all, not with indifference, 
but without any fiery perturbation or discom- 
posure. 

There is one quality which marks in common 
both a very ripe and a very unripe mind of a cer- 
tain stamp, — a readiness, namely, to turn with 
elation to all sorts of subjects. But it requires no 
words to point out the difference between these two 
forms of versatility. It is not to be discouraged in 
any case, because a variety of interests, however 
thin and superficial they may be, is incalculably to 
be preferred to a lethargic loitering over one dull 
little bit of ground. Hence the folly of people 
who pride themselves on a prudence, too charitably 
so-called, which consists in tethering their interests 
to some one post, personal or professional, political 
or theological, and who demand with more or less 
force that everybody else with whom they think 



172 Studies in Conduct. 

they ought to have influence should confine him- 
self within the same bounds. 

But the man who has lived long enough, and 
long enough in the right way, to make himself 
vigorous on many sides, and agile in many situa- 
tions, has not been affected by the considerations 
which weigh decisively with persons who lack the 
courage, and still more the patience, to let cha- 
racter ripen naturally, without excessive eagerness 
to force it too rapidly or too narrowly in a given 
direction, or to stop its growth at a given height. 
He feels that time and industry and the mainte- 
nance of a thoroughly open mind all round are 
sure to end well, and to give him that deep know- 
ledge of his own strong places which is essential to 
anything like making the best of himself. If he 
had been impelled by the hurry of the age and by 
ill-advising counsellors to submit to a process of 
forcing, he could never have got this knowledge, 
and his life would have been by so much the more 
savourless. The consciousness, however, that some 
of the best work in every department is done by 
men who ripened late does not prevent him from 
sighing over the lapse of the years that intervene. 
Milton, who saw the good of not choosing a sub- 
ject too soon and of beginning late, could wonder 
at three-and-twenty whether " some more timely- 
happy spirits" were riper than his own : — 



Mental Ripeness, i 73 

"My hasting days fly on with full career, 
But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. 
Perhaps my semblance may deceive the truth, 
That I to manhood am arrived so near ; 
And inward ripeness doth much less appear." 

Industrious waiting will not necessarily make 
Miltons, but it improves the chances. 





XVIII. 

FAVOURITE AUTHORS. 

NEARLY everybody ; it may be sup- 
posed, who reads at all, likes some 
books and some authors better than 
other books and authors. The qua- 
lification of "nearly" is necessary, because there 
is a very considerable number of people with such 
flaccid minds as to be incapable of a deliberate pre- 
ference either in literature or anything else. To 
be able to place one thing over another, it is requi- 
site to go through at least a certain amount of 
exertion, and the flaccid mind is not equal to the 
effort. In the midst of all that is said, and not 
unjustly, as to the increasing taste for books, we 
are apt to forget that people who read with intelli- 
gence and edification are still a very tiny minority 
of those who profess to have opinions, and who 
really influence the opinions of others. Women, 



Favourite Authors. 175 

for instance, as a rule, are not thoughtful readers. 
They are so intensely practical, in the narrowest, 
and often the worst, sense of the term, as to look 
with habitual distrust upon those general ideas 
which it is the chief business of literature to sow. 
After a young lady has got into the post-Tennvso- 
nian period — that is to say, as soon as she is married 
and has children — it usually appears that her mind 
is not roomy enough to contain at once a vigorous 
taste for books and a just interest in the various 
duties of her position. And women are not the per- 
sons most to blame for this. How many husbands, 
even of the educated sort, would like their wives 
to be great readers? Wives ought to devote their 
time, it is said, not to books, but to their children. 
That is to say,, those who have to exercise the 
deepest and most lasting influence upon thfe- grow- 
ing generation are themselves to take the least 
possible pains to make that influence the fruit of 
knowledge and enlightenment. But the hearty it 
is argued, teaches more wisely than books. 

The same sort of apology is made for everybody 
who chooses to surrender himself to habits of men- 
tal slovenliness, provided his visible conduct does 
not outrage the ordinary canons. There is a com- 
mon belief in the existence of some kind of inner 
light which enables us to dispense all but entirely 
with any attention to outer lights. It does not 
teach us arithmetic or Euclid, or Greek verbs or 



ij6 Studies in Conduct. 

history, it is true. But of course these are only 
elements, which it would be beneath the dignity of 
the intellectual inner light to disclose. After we 
have got over the elements, then it becomes un- 
speakably brilliant and instructive. To say of a 
man that at any rate his heart is in the right place 
is at once held to cover over most handsomely the 
fact that he is a narrow, ignorant, bigoted block- 
head. Most of the mischief in the world has been 
brought about by men with hearts in the right 
place. Still the strong prevalence of this fallacy 
makes people unconsciously indifferent, after a cer- 
tain point, to sustained intellectual culture. They 
know they mean w r ell, and they believe, though 
without expressing their faith in a verbal formula^ 
that, after all, experience of life and the light of 
nature together reduce books to the rank of a sort 
of luxury which we can do either with or without. 

Hence, to revert to our starting-point, not one 
reader in a thousand devotes to the very best books 
he ever happens to read (of course except for pro- 
fessional purposes) a fraction of the close attention 
which he had to give in his youth to " Nine Times " 
in the Multiplication Table, or to the Forty-seventh 
Proposition of the First Book of Euclid. The ma- 
jority of books are as unworthy of receiving this 
attention as the majority of readers are unwilling 
to give it ; but unless a man is in the habit of read- 
ing a few books which are worthy of it, he must 



Favourite Authors. \ 7 7 

be considered a very unfortunate person. Not that, 
as a matter of fact, those who only give a bit of 
their minds to any book they read are any less 
positive that it is a good book or a bad book, than 
they are that any two sides of a triangle are to- 
gether greater than the third side. There is some- 
thing delightful in the perfect conclusiveness and 
authority with which they pronounce sentence, hav- 
ing just caught a fragment of the evidence here 
and there, as their attention happened accidentally 
to be on the alert, and having perhaps by an un- 
lucky chance fallen asleep over the part which con- 
tained the very gist and pith of the whole. For 
this reason a good deal of the strong preference 
which one hears professed for this book or that, of 
the vehement admiration for one author or the 
other, must be taken with a large allowance. Men- 
tal inertia on the one hand, and mental hastiness 
and temerity on the other, hinder people from 
forming solid judgments of books as of other things, 
but they comparatively seldom stand in the way of 
a dogmatic enunciation of something which has all 
the outside look of a solid judgment. 

Nothing is funnier than the airs which most 
people assume about their favourite author. They 
think they receive rays of reflected glory from him 
if he is famous and widely read, or, if not, that in ad- 
miring him they are showing a superior discernment 
to that of the common crowd. Laudare laudatum 

N 



178 Studies in Conduct. 

is only second to laudari a laudato as a means of 
making oneself conspicuous. The truth is, all this 
time, that they have no more right to talk about a 
favourite author than a man who has never tasted 
anything but small beer has to talk about his fa- 
vourite wine. Let us reflect on the wonderful fact 
that a writer who has so very little and such poor 
stuff to give the world as Mr. Tupper is the favou- 
rite author of this country. He is the champion 
of all England. Before him all other philosophers, 
wits, poets, pale their ineffectual fires. This ought 
not to be particularly discouraging, because from 
the very nature of the case no human being who 
can read Mr. Tupper and enjoy him could possibly 
enjoy any other author ; and, after all, it is better to 
enjoy a halfpennyworth of skimmed milk than to 
enjoy nothing at all. There is more nourishment 
probably in blue milk than in pure water. 

Still the soberest of mortals can hardly keep him- 
self from laughing if one holds up this poor washy 
halfpennyworth as does every other lady you meet, 
and vows with a preposterous affectation of convi- 
viality that here is the draught for your true hero. 
The champion favourite is in the long run the 
kindest friend to those who are severely worsted in 
the contest for fame; for the author who is smart- 
ing most keenly under the neglect of contemporaries 
finds balm for his wounds and solace for his bruised 
spirit in the reflection, for which he is probably 



Favourite Authors. j 79 

indebted to the first friend whom he sees, that, 
though his book is not read, the c Proverbial Philo- 
sophy' is. This confers a genuine distinction upon 
an unsold edition, of which every writer of a phi- 
losophic temper ought to be deeply sensible. What 
more damning thing could be said of him than that 
his book had gone through five-and-twenty edi- 
tions ? Nemesis overtakes the man of unnumbered 
editions in the shape of the laughter and amaze- 
ment of posterity. Nobody ever hits the taste of 
the huge unthinking majority in his own time 
without going a long way wide of the taste of the 
next generation, unless indeed civilization makes 
a temporary move backwards for his express be- 
hoof. 

Many people speak of their favourite author as 
advertising tailors might speak of their poet — as 
some poor devil to whom they are doing rather a 
good turn by installing him in so exalted a post. 
The truth is that, if he is a good author, it is to 
themselves that they are paying the compliment, 
and not to him. To protest admiration for a writer 
is to protest in a measure that you understand him, 
and are up to his level of thought and feeling. 
Yet we often hear persons talk in language of con- 
ventional enthusiasm about poets and philosophers, 
into the bare outside portico of whose minds they 
are utterly unable to enter. In praising them they 
are indirectly bestowing upon themselves a measure 

n 2 



i8o Studies in Conduct. 

of praise to which they have no title whatever. It 
would be unreasonable to say that a man has no 
right to speak of a moralist or a poet as his fa- 
vourite because in practice he transgresses his fa- 
vourite's teaching. Inconsistency of this sort is a 
different thing. Plenty of people have a clear and 
fervent perception of the beauty and power of the 
fine poem of f Love and Duty/ for example, who 
yet go and straightway yield to love, and quench 
considerations of duty. This is bad enough, but 
it comes under a different head. What we mean 
here is that there is much imposture about favou- 
rite authors. People pretend to like writings which 
they are quite incompetent to fathom, or even to 
get an inch below the surface of. And then they 
think somehow that the author ought to be very 
much obliged to them. Authors have encouraged 
this delusion by too much whimsical talk about 
an " over-indulgent " public and the " gentle for- 
bearance of the kind reader." If a reader likes a 
book, it is he who is indebted to the writer, and 
not the writer to him, for liking what the writer 
has done. 

A certain measure of praise encourages an au- 
thor, like his neighbours, but an author is not 
worth very much who cannot get on very well 
without it. He may be anxious in moderation 
about a review, because the want of a review may 
keep his book back from the public for years \ stilly, 



Favourite Authors. 181 

if he knows that he has worked as hard as he 
could, and given the best ideas he possessed, it is 
no fault of his if the world will not make him a 
favourite. If he writes books in return for daily 
bread, to be a favourite author may be more of an 
object with him ; and this very fact helps to explain 
the almost universal rule that the best and highest 
literary work of every generation is not done by 
the professional writers who have to make a living 
by the pen. Again, weak human nature may sigh 
for a little praise and popularity ; only a nature 
which yields to the weakness is very apt to get into 
a way of swallowing praise omnivorously. There 
are writers, one may presume, as there are painters, 
sculptors, and merchants, to whom all flattery is 
grist that comes to the mill. The eulogy of the 
wise is pleasant to them, but so is the eulogy of 
the fool. There is something downright incom- 
prehensible in an indiscriminate appetite of this 
kind. It is at all events certain that nobody who 
is a victim to it can enjoy much of his own respect, 
and thus what he gains in one way he loses in 
another. It must, moreover, be a bitter drop in 
the blissful cup of a favourite author to know that 
he is pretty sure to be the favourite of as many 
fools as philosophers. Indeed, has not one felt a 
shock of surprise and bitterness at finding the 
books of the writer in whom we take the most 
constant delight, on the shelves of some weak- 



1 82 Studies in Conduct. 

minded castaway? It is as if we should see a 
noble statue in an ignoble and obscene place. An 
author ought at least to feel as angry as one of his 
disciples at such incongruity. The admiration of 
the weak-minded castaway ought to be positively 
displeasing to him. Too often, however, it is not, 
and all is fish that comes to the net. 

There is one source of vexation to which even 
the favourites are frequently exposed, though it 
ought, in fact, to be very instructive to them. A 
poet, say, is enchanted to find that a lady thinks 
his productions all that is delicate and profound 
and rich. She sits with endless reverence and 
admiration at his poetic feet. But presently he 
finds, not merely that he is not the only deity 
whose image has a place in her temple, but that in 
the next niche to his own, and adored with like 
honours, is the writer whom of all others he thinks 
the stupidest, emptiest, and most generally despic- 
able. The steam of the incense ascends as plen- 
teously for some superficial dolt as for his own 
high and mighty genius. His autograph, which 
was prayed for and obtained with so much enthu- 
siasm, he finds, to his mortification, placed next in 
the idolatrous collection to that of the most over- 
rated fool in the universe. The slave is sitting by 
his side in the triumphal car. But, though exas- 
perating, this discipline is very salutary. There is 
very often a sequel to it, more salutary still. 



Favourite Authors. i 83 

Worshippers are inconstant. The most tremen- 
dously enthusiastic among them are often the most 
capricious. The idol of to-day is dashed in pieces 
before the end of the twelvemonth, and his shrine 
is taken by another. There are men and women 
of such elastic mould that every book that they 
come across is the very best they ever read. Its 
author is the wisest, greatest, most suggestive, who 
ever wrote. This exceeding changefulness indi- 
cates a charming flexibility and openness of intel- 
ligence, but it may be carried too far, and it is 
not without its social inconveniences. You parted 
from one of these persons a week ago, full of 
admiration for the writings of Mr. Carlyle, say. 
On meeting him again, you presume that time 
enough has scarcely elapsed for this admiration to 
have passed away. But time was made for slaves. 
Your assumption is no sooner acted upon than it 
instantly appears that he has been reading some- 
thing else, which sends all that Mr. Carlyle has to 
say gibbering into space. It is unfeeling, and even 
indelicate, to remind him of his equally vast en- 
thusiasm on the other side seven days before. 
Mr. Carlyle is much too sensible to care a straw 
whether a disciple sticks to him or not. But the 
second-rate man, who sincerely relishes being a 
favourite author, is much wounded. And if he was 
hugely elated at the adherence of the capricious 
man, it is reasonable that he should be as hugely 



184 Studies in Conduct. 

depressed at his defection. Those who think 
much, and love their work for itself, and have 
really got something to say, miss one of* these 
moods, but then they also escape the other, so they 
are not without their compensation. 

Even those who with sincerity and competent 
judgment have a favourite author, one whose 
thoughts they can appreciate with genuine sympa- 
thy, and whom they do not take up for a whim of 
the hour, are exposed to perils of their own. There 
is no greater bore than the man of one book, or 
the man who is content on every subject to swear 
by the authority of one master. Everybody knows 
an example or two of this narrowing and excessive 
admiration. There is at least one great living 
writer, himself an eager and able assailant of the 
habit of taking things on trust, and yet whose ipse 
dixit is too often made to serve instead of an 
argument by injudicious followers. It is in this 
way that the world gets on so slowly. The adven- 
turous discoverer gets a reputation and a set of 
disciples, who forthwith declare that discovery can 
go no further, and set their faces dead against the 
adventurous temper which was the chief distinction 
of their master. It is not good for men to worship 
idols. A favourite author, therefore, ought not to 
be allowed to get too strong a hold on one. Per- 
haps it would be a safe general rule never to ele- 
vate a writer to this position of power over us 



Favourite Authors. 185 

until we are quite sure that we know that he has a 
weak side, and in what direction to look for it. It 
is a very bad thing to have even a good despot to 
rule over us, and to save us the trouble of doing 
our own thinking. Hence, instead of flying into 
a passion, as they usually do when they hear their 
favourite poet or philosopher ever so justly attacked, 
and the erroneous or defective part of his teaching 
ever so pungently shown up, people ought to be 
extremely grateful, and to make the best possible 
use of the opportunity. 

And here let an important distinction be drawn 
between a man's character and his teaching, other- 
wise what has been said may be mistaken for a 
piece of peculiarly detestable poorness of soul. 
Whatever makes us think the worse of a favourite 
character is so far an evil. We should be the re- 
verse of thankful to anybody who should dwell, 
for instance, on the weak points in the personal 
character or conduct of such a man as Johnson 
or Burke or Wesley. Of course, if you find a man 
worshipping a thoroughly bad and unworthy per- 
son, it is a plain duty to teach him to worship 
somebody better by showing him how false a god 
he has got at present. But if the character is in 
the main and substantially worthy of reverence, it 
is worse than pitiful work to labour to show up its 
weak points, or to be always on the look-out for 
them on one's own account. Excellent persons, 



1 86 Studies in Conduct. 

however, may plainly talk great nonsense. Burke 
was often so violent in his doctrine as to pass for a 
madman. Johnson was a Tory. Wesley believed 
in ghosts. All three held a great many views 
which it would be a charity to expel from the minds 
of those disciples who insist on holding every jot 
and tittle of what their masters taught, and just 
as it was held by them. And it is the same with 
all favourite leaders. Revere their strength or 
purity of character as much as you will ; but it is 
a dire mistake to swear by all they have said on 
subjects which ought to be submitted to indepen- 
dent judgment, and not settled by general sympa- 
thies. 





XIX. 



DRAWING-ROOM CRITICS. 




' HE appearance of a book which is read 
by all the world, always affords an 
excellent opportunity of measuring 
the taste, judgment, and discrimina- 
tion of the people for whom books are supposed to 
be written. A novel by an eminent author calls 
forth an amount of unwritten criticism which illus- 
trates the force and diversity of popular opinion 
on literary matters with more completeness than 
any other kind of composition. A man or woman 
with ever so mean an understanding and ever so 
small an interest in things still feels perfectly com- 
petent to crown or condemn a novel. It is the 
same with paintings, and very nearly the same with 
music. History, philosophy, science, they saga- 
ciously leave alone. These are delicate subjects 
for people who know nothing about them, because 
they can scarcely advance a step without making 



1 88 Studies in Conduct. 

their ignorance conspicuous. But in what are 
called light subjects the case is different, and all 
art is looked upon as a light subject. With a vile 
affectation of humility, these critics of the parlour 
ostentatiously avow that they don't understand 
high art, and are entirely ignorant of grand critical 
principles ; still they know what gives them plea- 
sure, and they are not sure whether this, after all, 
is not as good a test as another of artistic success. 

This modest way of putting the case really veils 
a profound conviction that, though not learned in 
the pedantry of academies, they have a fine natural 
insight into the True and the Beautiful which is 
worth infinitely more than all that academies have 
got to teach. At bottom they sincerely believe 
that the pleasure which they derive from a book 
or a song or a picture is in truth the standard of 
its worth. And the giving of pleasure may be an 
end of all artistic composition. Only it is worth 
remembering that everything depends on the sort 
of people to whom a piece is fit to give pleasure. 
The jovial song which fills with delirious transports 
the dull brain of a beery clown in an alehouse may 
not be very admirable in ears polite. And the 
young ladies, for example, who pass sentence so 
unflinchingly on novels might perhaps usefully re- 
member that neither the tears which the woes of a 
heroine can draw from them, nor the warm sym- 
pathy with which they at length see her united to 



Drawing-room Critics. 189 

a constant lover, can be taken for a conclusive 
proof that the novelist's" work has been well done, 
any more than their falling asleep over the middle 
of the second volume is a proof that he has done 
his work ill. Too often they are as little able to 
appreciate the best and highest kind of fiction as 
the beery clown would be to appreciate one of 
Beethoven's sonatas or one of Mendelssohn's Lie- 
der. The incapacity, which in the one case comes 
of beer and dulness combined, is in the other th'e 
simpler fruit of dulness and no beer. 

There is something very wonderful in the extent 
to which people shamelessly allow their judgments 
to grow out of feelings that are no better than 
sheer caprices. For instance, in the drawing-room 
it is commonly considered an altogether fatal de- 
fect in a novel not to end well. An excellent 
story recently concluded in a way which every 
novelist whose single aim is a wide popularity 
ought to ponder by day and by night. The sorely- 
tried hero is left comfortably snoring by the side 
of the no less sorely-tried heroine. The reader 
was charmed at an end so undeniably satisfac- 
tory and blissful. The same novelist, in another 
book, furnishes a warning as instructive as his 
example in the last case. A young lady who had 
been very badly used by one lover, instead of 
making up her mind to accept the other lover who 
wishes to use her well, resolves to go on wearing 



190 Studies in Conduct. 

the willow to the day of her death. Cries against 
the injustice of an author who could leave so 
charming a heroine in such pitiful plight re- 
sounded on all sides from an outraged public. 
Perhaps it was the general anger at the fate of 
Lily .Dale which made the author resolve to go to 
the opposite extreme in finally disposing of his 
next hero. Lucy of Lammermoor is in many re- 
spects one of Scott's best stories, but it would have 
been far more popular if Lucy and Edgar had been 
left to live happy ever after. There are popular 
critics of this temper who would like ' Hamlet' 
much, better if, instead of the curtain falling on a 
dozen corpses, the final tableau had consisted of 
old Polonius giving his blessing to Ophelia and 
the Prince, kneeling with clasped hands at his feet. 
On the same principle also, we presume, it must 
ever be regarded as a sad fault in the composition 
of another tragedy, that Othello did not find out a 
little sooner that Desdemona was faithful, and that 
lago had been making a fool of him all the time. 
This prevailing passion for a happy ending is only 
a caprice after all. There can be no conceivable 
principle of composition to countenance such a 
passion. It is about as defensible as Lord Byron's 
notion that all music should be played quick. 

A still more spacious field for the exhibition of 
the caprice of the critics who do not use pens for 
their criticism is found in determining what they 



Drawing -room Critics. 191 

wiU regard as interesting. If a novel is really and 
undoubtedly uninteresting, it is only fit to be cast 
into the fire. But it is impossible to gather what 
special qualities those are which novel- readers agree 
in requiring as the conditions of their interest. 
The controversy whether a given story is highly 
interesting or deeply dull sometimes divides a 
whole house against itself, setting the father against 
the son, and a mother against her daughter, and 
the mother-in-law against the daughter-in-law. 
Not seldom do the dissentient critics let their an- 
griest passions rise against one another. One re- 
fuses to take any sort of interest in a rude young 
radical who wears a cloth cap and goes without a 
shirt-collar, and makes known his opinions in sea- 
son and out of season, to people who like them 
and people who hate them, indifferently. Another 
scornfully asks what rational being can feel con- 
cern about one of those slight, yellow -haired, 
glittering-eyed, metallic-voiced young murderesses 
who are so conspicuous, and so very generally 
popular, in modern fiction. A third person likes 
Radicals, and does not much object to a yellow- 
haired woman with violent passions, yet will not 
tolerate for a heroine an insipid young woman who 
has no character in particular, but is in a state of 
constant perplexity as to which of two lovers she 
likes best, first jilting one, then the other, and 
finally returning to somebody else who preceded 



193 Studies in Conduct. 

them both in her uncertain affections. The draw- 
ing-room critics, instead of cultivating a broad ex- 
pansive taste, and making their interests as wide 
as possible, like to worship only one idol and one 
style. They either narrow their partialities to 
love-stories simply, or to stories of love and mur- 
der artistically mixed, or else to stories of charac- 
ter. On whatever style they may ultimately fix, 
they resolutely disparage every other. Where there 
is a largish family of novel-reading daughters, this 
narrowness proves, as Mrs. Lirriper would say, 
" fruitful hot-water for all parties." Their discus- 
sions are endless, just because they are aimless. 
Each is a great deal too well acquainted with the 
iron resolution of the others to hope to effect a 
conversion. Still, young ladies who argue, like 
some young men and some old men, rest all their 
hopes in what has been called, we do not know 
why, the Italian mode of argument, which consists 
in repeating the disputed assertion a certain num- 
ber of times in precisely the same words in which 
it was first made. To a sensible man this very 
soon brings conviction, because he would rather 
recant his most fondly-cherished doctrine on the 
subject of a novel than prolong so monotonous a 
controversy with even the handsomest antagonist. 
It is indeed the tendency of all disputes as to 
whether a certain character is interesting or dull, 
mean or admirable, generous or stupid, to partake 



Dramnff-room Critics. i 9 5 

of that energy which is naturally evoked in talk- 
ing about persons, either real or fictitious. This 
energy among people of an enthusiastic tempera- 
ment occasionally arrives at an unpleasant degree 
of heat, and to unimpassioned bystanders may be 
quite as amusing as the novel which has generated 
such warmth. 

Nor is this the only point in which it is possible 
for a novel to divert us less than the domestic cri- 
ticism to which it gives rise. Disputes both as to 
probability of incident and consistency of character 
constantly reveal wondrous depths of psychological 
knowledge, and wondrous theories as to the way in 
which the world goes on. The question whether 
any woman that ever was born would have been 
reclaimed from a frivolous and small way of look- 
ing at things by the brusque reproaches of so au- 
dacious a young man as Felix Holt, who wore a 
cloth cap and no collar, is evidently susceptible of 
endless discussion among a class who have not yet 
been reclaimed from a frivolous and small way of 
looking at things either by young men with caps 
or young men with the best hats. This leads up 
to strange disputations as to whether a man like 
Felix Holt was likely to have fallen in love with a 
woman like Esther Lyon. Women generally seem 
to think that he was too grave and too much in 
earnest ; but men, who often know more of these 
things than the sex which has an overrated cha- 

o 



194 Studies in Conduct, 

racter for sensibility, insist that the grave and 
thoughtful man is rather more likely to fall in love 
with a pretty, graceful, light-hearted woman, than 
if he were as vain and light-hearted as she is. An 
attentive observer of the general current of tea- 
table criticism may get out of it a considerable 
knowledge of female character; and we are not 
sure that a man in search of a wife could have 
many better ways of finding out the disposition of 
a candidate for his hand than putting her a series 
of questions upon the nature and conduct of the 
various people in one or two good novels. For 
when a lady maintains that somebody in a novel, 
if he had acted consistently, would have acted in a 
certain way, she perhaps generally means no more 
than that this is the way in which she herself 
would have acted. The only drawback to the 
trustworthiness of this method is the artificial style 
which enters so largely into all conversation, and 
more particularly into the conversation between 
young women and young men. They habitually 
talk in falsetto. If they did not, the debates over 
novels might be amazingly instructive to anybody 
who happened to take an interest in the average 
sense and discernment of his acquaintances. 

There is more especially a large fund of instruc- 
tion in the talk which goes on over a novel which 
is either coming out in parts, or of which the third 
volume cannot be procured from the circulating 



Drawing-room Critics. 195 

library. Conjectures as to the way in which it 
will all end, what will become of so-and-so, whether 
the curate will marry the earPs daughter, whether 
the groom will turn out to be the heir to a barony 
in disguise, whether the heroine has three or only 
two husbands alive, whether she murdered her so- 
called sister or only had her confined in an asylum 
for life — all this opens up a splendid field for spe- 
culation^ and the answers shed a flood of light on 
the ingenuity and penetration of the speaker. 

It is perhaps enough to say of the critics of the 
drawing-room that they present all the faults which 
are vulgarly charged against the professional critic, 
but in a very exaggerated form, because they are 
without his sense of responsibility. We very often 
near people talk decisively about books which they 
have barely read. Or, instead of forming an in- 
dependent opinion, they echo the opinion of 
somebody else. Or they put forward their views 
with too little qualification and explanation, using 
bigger phrases than they are altogether well able 
to manage. Still it is so important that people 
should learn not to bolt the books they read, that 
even a crudish censure or eulogy of a novel is 
better than a stolid and lethargic apathy or igno- 
rance as to the very existence of a difference between 
good and bad. Whether this reflection is any con- 
solation to a novelist, or any inducement to compe- 
tent persons to turn novelists, is more than doubtful. 

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XX. 



SYMPATHY WITH NATURE. 




EOPLE who are fond of giving very 
sublime reasons for very simple ac- 
tions, and of gilding over honest mo- 
tives with superfine pretences, some- 
times urge as a plea for their summer holiday that 
it refreshes their sympathy with nature. This 
phrase has a deep sound about it, which makes it 
excellently calculated to take one in, in a tho- 
roughly satisfactory manner. Sympathy with na- 
ture is one of those sentiments which, since the 
poetic revival at the beginning of the century, 
have been considered essential to every well-fur- 
nished mind. It is a piece of the stock equipment 
of modern character. The man who lacks it is 
looked upon, and justly so, as an incomplete being. 
Only it is far from certain that every one who 
cries out about Nature does in truth enter into her 



Sympathy tvith Nature. 197 

kingdom. In this, as in other religions, there is 
to be heard enough, and too much, of cant and 
insincere conventionality. The passion for the 
wonders and beauties and horrors of the external 
world, like most other high emotions, is an attrac- 
tive thing for hollow-minded people and simpletons 
to counterfeit, just because it is high. To those 
who do not examine too closely, all high things 
seem vague • and whatever commonly passes for 
vague is easily imitated, because its distinctive 
notes are only discernible by the few. Sympathy 
with nature has its own marks, stamped plainly 
upon all who are endowed with it, but the world is 
not very careful to distinguish the true marks from 
the false. There is no end to the spurious forms 
which have passed current for genuine, and it is 
scarcely agreeable to reflect how many of them 
still survive, in spite of the steady movement of 
the last two generations towards the true spirit 
and meaning of nature. The tourist who tells you 
that he is going to Switzerland or Italy to freshen 
his passion for nature generally means by it a 
passion for dawdling in the sunshine with nothing 
on his mind. And, of course, there is no harm 
in such a taste. It is much more creditable than 
a taste for dawdling about with foolish young 
women, or over a wine-bottle. To be able to lux- 
uriate in simple sunny inactivity is a quality of a 
healthy character. But there is nothing gained 



198 Studies in Conduct. 

by giving a fine-sounding name to what is, after 
all, only unobjectionable laziness, and is wholly un- 
fruitful of positive results upon character. 

If, however, nothing is gained by such a coun- 
terfeit as this, at least there is no great harm done, 
beyond conferring on a man a shade more of self- 
satisfaction than he is entitled to. This is more 
than can be said of another and still more pre- 
valent imposture in the same matter. A school 
of younger men has arisen — nor do they lack a 
consecrating bard — who persuade themselves that 
sympathy with nature means, and means exclu- 
sively, a fiery revelling in her sensuous delights, 
added to an abject grovelling before her sterner 
moods. What they call sympathy is, in fact, a 
mixture of a drunken fondness for bright colours 
and heavy scents, with a dismal conviction that 
these are only meant to befool us while we are 
being crushed under the feet of malignant ruthless 
gods. In time, the thought of the malignity and 
the ruthlessness becomes as attractive to them as 
the joys which they frantically purvey for their 
senses. Among other reasons for this is the deep 
consolation which reflections upon the malignity 
of fate bring to minds inflamed with spite and 
detestation against their kind. The man whose 
belief never goes beyond the gratification of his 
own senses cannot fail to despise and hate all who 
arrange the objects of life on wider principles. 



Sympathy with Nature, 199 

He likes to gloat over the cruelties of destiny. 
because, though visiting himself too, they will 
still curse these objects of his hatred, and repay 
them for the vile sin of exalting reason, instead of 
feasting and inflaming their senses. It pleases him 
to reflect that the gods are C( too great to appease, 
too high to appal, too far to call," and he is will- 
ing to defy them for his own part, for the glee 
which they provide for him in the distresses laid 
upon his neighbours. In such cases love of nature 
is only another name for hatred of the human 
race. 

But sentiments of this kind are not properly 
understood unless we know something of their 
source. The existence of so hideous a state of 
feeling is largely due to a reaction against the old 
notion that Nature is a sort of Mistress Hannah 
More — that the spirit of the universe is an old 
lady with a thoroughly well-regulated disposition 
according to the best English principles, — the pre- 
siding genius, as it were, of a Minerva Academy. 
Tucker says that when he was first taught his 
prayers he " used to have the idea of a venerable 
old man, of a composed benign countenance, with 
his own hair, clad in a morning-gown of a grave- 
coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow- 
chair." The vulgar notion of nature is not less 
homely, nor less irrational. Contempt and resent- 
ment were sure to arise against this puny starved 



aoo Studies in Conduct. 

conception of the gigantic forces and processes 
both of the heart of man and of the universe out- 
side of man. But it would be a very grave mis- 
fortune if this resentment were to continue to flow 
in channels that are far more pestilent for mankind 
than the misconception which gave birth to such 
resentment. For this lustful hugging of nature is, 
in truth, the kindling and feeding of all those 
barbarous anarchic passions, the control and mo- 
deration over which has been the aim of all 
progress. They are the field of civilization's first 
and most essential victory. 

The new sympathy with nature, so far as it 
means antipathy to man and contempt for him, 
is one of the most violently explosive social forces 
that have ever been discovered. If the idea 
of self-denial is to be expunged from the list 
of the things worthy of contemplation, and the 
practice of self-denial from the list of things 
worthy of cultivation, then society must inevit- 
ably fall to pieces. If all men and women are 
to insist on drinking to the dregs the cup of 
every desire of their animal nature, without a 
thought of the effects which may flow from their 
gratification, then it is plain that most of the 
business of the world will come to a standstill. 
People will have no time to labour, and they will 
have no inclination either, for, self-control being a 
pale-blooded and trumpery virtue, there can be no 



Sympathy with Nature. 201 

reason why the idle should not help himself to 
whatever he may want from the stores of the in- 
dustrious. There can be no more deadly and bane- 
ful influence than one which teaches men to prefer 
anything under the sun to the happiness of the 
whole mass of sentient creatures. Beauty, truth, 
justice, every virtue, every pursuit, every taste — 
they are all good because, and just in so far as, 
they augment this stock. Whatever makes a man 
indifferent to the extension of happiness and the 
corresponding curtailment of the too wide domains 
of pain and misery, is doing the worst ill that can 
possibly be done to his whole character. After all, 
the end of everything is living. Conduct is at 
once the aim and the test of all our learning and 
thinking and striving. The man lives most per- 
fectly whose most constant happiness is found in 
the consciousness that, in doing the best that he 
can for himself, he is also doing the best that he 
can for every being that is capable of having good 
done to it. Supposing it were true, as fiery poets 
of despair are never weary of crying aloud to us, 
that Nature hates us, and that the gods are never 
found by our prayers. Is not this all the more 
reason why we should be as gods to one another? 
Nature may be as stern and implacable as they 
say, but at least she has been kind in implanting the 
capacity for pity in the souls of the creatures she 
has abandoned. This single boon may in some 



%oz Studies in Conduct. 

sort atone for the lack of all other good gifts, if 
there be such a lack. Granting that we are left 
alone on the face of the earth, does it follow, or is 
it reasonable to suppose, that the only thing for 
us to do is to borrow all our motives and mould all 
our passions from the example of tigers and ti- 
gresses? Everybody admits, it may be said, that 
pity is a duty, and to insist on this is to insist on 
a truism. But truisms need to be repeated in the 
face of a mischievous paradox. They are only 
useless when everybody concedes them. An evil 
spirit has arisen which scoffs at pity, inviting us, 
instead of helping, to stand easily by and laugh at 
the Great Human Comedy. 

Nothing among the curiosities of mental history 
can be more odd than that this temper should find 
its origin or its chief encouragement in a distorted 
passion for external nature. Acting on a healthy 
spirit, the contemplation of the order of life and 
growth and constant change in material things 
would seem to be the surest instrument for breed- 
ing humanity and evenness of mind. For con- 
templation of nature tends, above all other things, 
to fill people, who are susceptible of deep feeling 
of any sort, with awe, and few states of mind are 
so favourable as this of awe to the development of 
wide sentiments of beneficence. Awe, unless it 
be the servile awe of the gaping uncultured clown, 
is one of the most ennobling of all emotions, and 



Sympathy with Nature. 203 

no emotion has any title to be called noble at all 
which does not throw a man into deeper harmony 
with everything that is going on around him. To 
widen the circle of his sensibilities, and to discover 
the wisest means for making these sensibilities of 
use in the world, are the two great aims, though 
perhaps not distinctly realized, of the philosophic 
liver. The creatures, albeit creatures of genius, 
who skip to and fro raving about their sensibilities, 
and basely indifferent to the feelings and interests 
of the rest of men, may have a wordy sympathy 
with nature, but it is worth not much to them- 
selves, and nothing at all to mankind. They con- 
tribute less to the existing stock of good things 
than if they had been virtuous tinkers.* 

* I venture to add in this place a passage in which I was 
criticizing a remarkable poet of our time, who habitually 
" leaves those lofty seats of passion, where the mind is exhila- 
rated and inspired as by the winds that sweep from over the 
unmeasured waste of the sea, and betakes himself into tropical 
swamps of passion, where everything is sweltering in fierce and 
consuming heat, where there are uncouth destructive monsters, 
and where even the flowers and plants are of a size and form to 
fill men with fear." 

" In the midst of this vigour there has as yet been no sign in 
his writing of that great quality without which genius is worth 
so little to the world. It is not easy to find an adequate name 
for this very salt of genius. Perhaps Beneficence is as good as 
any that we are likely to find ; and by it is meant the enlarged 
and humane sympathy with all happiness, whether of man or 
beast, or bird or creeping thing, the lofty fervent pity for all the 
pain of body and pain of soul endured among sentient creatures, 
and, above all, the strong enthusiasm for all that has been done 



204 Studies in Conduct, 

Perhaps one of the most certain signs that the 
true meaning of sympathy with nature has been 
more extensively recognized in our times, in spite 
of the growth of this new and plague-stricken 
school, is the visible spread of the idea that every 
sentient creature ought to be treated with huma- 
nity, just as much as the members of our own 
species. As a corollary to that advance of en- 
lightenment which prevents us from maltreating 
lunatics and burning ugly old women, we have 
learnt, though not very universally, the propriety 
of consideration for all sorts of ugly and foul ani- 
mals and reptiles. Loathing and terror in the 
presence of hideous and monstrous shapes has be- 
come exchanged for a gentle pity. It is seen that 
these dumb and helpless things have a capacity for 
something which at least passes with them for 
pleasure. Who that has read it can forget the 
French poet's picture of the black venomous toad 

to add to the stock of happiness, and to take away somewhat 
from the stock of anguish, in the world. This genial breath of 
life it is the business of the poet above all others to breathe into 
men. It is this beneficence which makes Victor Hugo so vastly 
pre-eminent among the poets of the time. His 'passion and 
power in dealing with the higher things of nature, with her 
large issues and remote sources,' would be very sublime in any 
case, but their nobleness is enlarged and enriched a thousandfold 
by what we have called his spirit of Beneficence. The greatest 
of poets are neither mere subtle-minded vivacious elves and 
sprites, frisking about in the heated places of passion simply for 
the joy of frisking, nor mere giants, surveying all life indifferently 
as Epicurean G-ods." 



Sympathy with Nature. .z~ 

squatting meekly on the edge of its stagnant ditch 
on a summer evening, and relishing in its own 
humble way the calm of the surrounding scene ?* 
There are plenty of grown-up people of cultivation 
still to be found who would scarcely feel that they 
were doing anything very wrong if they gave the 
poor monster a poke with a stick, or set a dog on 
to plague him. But there are fewer people now 
of this involuntary unreflecting devilishness than 
there were twenty years since, and the whole ten- 
dency of the modern spirit is to make such people 
fewer still. Respect for happiness, even in the 
rudest and most uncouth shape which we can 
imagine happiness as assuming, is more widely 
perceived to be one of the first of social duties. 

* " Take the well-known picture of ' The Toad ' in the ' Le- 
gende des Siecles.' The hideous creature is squatting in the road 
in a summer evening, enjoying itself after its humble fashion. 
Some boys pass by, and amuse themselves by digging out its 
eyes, striking off its limbs, making holes in it. The wretched 
toad tries feebly to crawl away into the ditch. Its tormentors 
see an ass coming on drawing a cart, so. witli a scream of delight, 
they bethink themselves to put the toad hi the rut where it will 
be crushed by the wheel of the cart. The ass is weary with his 
day's work and his burden, and sore with the blows of his 
master, who even then is cursing and bethwacking him. But 
the ass turns his gentle eye upon the rut, sees the torn and 
bleeding toad, and with a painful effort drags his cart off the track. 
The whole picture gives one a heart-ache, but the gentleness of 
the ass is the single touch which makes the thought of so much 
horror endurable. In the 'Toilers of the Sea' we almost miss 
this single tonch. "Watching the sea year after year in the land 
of his exile, Victor Hugo has seen in it nothing but sternness and 



206 Studies in Conduct. 

There are all sorts of mistakes and affectations 
perpetrated by kind -hearted but weak-headed per- 
sons who try to make others happier, unconscious 
that they are going on principles that must even- 
tually augment the general stock of misery • and 
it is right that these mistakes and affectations 
should be exposed and denounced. Still, the 
spread of the universally beneficent temper in 
which they have at least a partial origin is one 
of the most essential conditions of the progress 
of civilization. And even when most thickly set 
in defects of taste and judgment, such a temper is 



cruelty. He finds it only the representative of the relentless 
Fatality of Nature, which man is constantly occupied in combat- 
ing and wrestling with. It is so real, so tragically effective, that 
such a reflection as that ' Time writes no wrinkle on its azure 
brow ' must seem the merest mimicry of poetic sentiment. The 
attitude which he has before assumed towards Society he also 
takes towards external Nature. To Keats Nature presented 
herself as a being whom even the monsters loved and followed, 
a goddess with white and smooth limbs, and deep breasts, teem- 
ing with fruit and oil and corn and flowers. Compared with the 
sensuous passion of Keats, the feeling of Wordsworth for Nature 
was an austere and distant reverence. He found in her little 
more than a storehouse of emblems for the better side of men. 
Victor Hugo is impressed by Nature, not as a goddess to be 
sensuously enclasped, not as some remote and pure spirit, shining 
cold yet benign upon men, but as man's cruel and implacable foe. 
Other poets have loved to make her anthropomorphic, and to 
invest her with the moral attributes of mortals. He holds with 
no such personification of Nature as a whole. Nature to him 
is little more than a chaos of furious and warring Forces." — 
From another "Essay by the present tvriter. 



Sympathy with Nature, 207 

unspeakably to be preferred to the childish cynicism 
of brainless young men about town and worn- 
out old men at clubs, or the empty ravings of 
men of genius who mistake grossness for passion, 
and unrestrained sensuality for nature. 





XXI. 



RURAL DELIGHTS. 




j]N the summer-time of the year, every- 
body with the slightest love of nature 
persuades himself that, if he were 
master of circumstances, he would 
never live anywhere but in the country. And 
a great many people amuse themselves by trying 
to think seriously that they are going to take a 
place in the country, and by picturing to them- 
selves all its perfections and delights. They have 
exquisite visions of croquet-lawns, and delicious 
borders of flowers, and of the poetic cow and homely 
pig in the background. They think how glorious 
it must be to feel the scents of the garden, and to 
hear the singing of the birds through one's bed- 
room window on getting up in the morning, and to 
watch the moon rise over the pine-tops as one goes 
to bed at night. The stuffiness and frowsiness of 



Rural Delights. 209 

town-houses in the summer, and that amazing 
compound smell of paving-stones and horse-dung 
which fills the London streets so mysteriously, 
naturally inspires these beatific thoughts. The 
house-agent with a Tennysonian genius for word- 
painting counts his victims by hundreds. The 
great secret that when he talks of a house in the 
midst of fields, he commonly means brickfields, is 
only discovered by degrees ; and it is not until we 
have wasted many days, and spent a great many 
pounds in railway fares and the hire of rural chaises 
to take us across country, that we realize what 
painful differences of opinion there may be among 
people as to what constitutes a desirable residence. 
After all, the house agent is himself a little vic- 
timized. The intention of living in the country is, 
with nine out of ten people who entertain it, a sheer 
delusion. They are quite honest, and have fully 
convinced themselves that they can only lead the 
ideal life among the green fields and the little birds 
and the vegetables. Still at bottom there is a 
lurking fear that after all they might find the 
country somewhat less of a paradise than they love 
to think it. And they are perfectly right, for na- 
ture, with her usual fondness for compensation, has 
put some rather heavy drawbacks into the scale 
against the delights of the fields. For example, 
the country is a very trying place for ladies. One 
of the chief delights of living in the country, to 

p 



210 Studies in Conduct. 

people accustomed to towns, is its splendid roomi- 
ness. You have a large flower-garden, and a large 
kitchen-garden, and airy meadows, and unnum- 
bered out-houses and offices, which, though of no 
particular use to speak of, fill the mind with a sense 
of spaciousness and overflowing accommodation. 
Then there are big woods at the back of the house, 
and breezy downs in front, and you are at least 
half-a-dozen miles from the nearest country town. 
All this gives one a noble feeling of freedom and 
expansiveness, and a notion that you are leading 
the life according to nature, which is quite true ; 
only married ladies and grown-up daughters are 
not always clear after a little experience, that the 
life according to nature is the pleasantest sort of 
life. For this admirable roominess implies that 
you are without neighbours, and women without 
neighbours are generally creatures of stunted lives. 
Neighbours are to them what his club and his 
profession and his newspaper are to one of the 
so-called sterner sex. It is all very well for the 
gentleman who is writing a great and immortal 
book, or for one who goes up to business every 
morning and comes down again at night, and who 
in truth has Sunday only to spend in his Paradise. 
But ordinary ladies do not write great books, and 
they have nothing to do all the solid day except a 
little gardening and novel-reading and piano- 
playing, and perhaps occasionally writing letters to 



Rural Delights, 211 

friends in town containing ecstatic accounts of the 
delights of the country. The visits of some adjoin- 
ing curate with a pony may make pleasant oases, 
but not even the whole of a young lady's mind can 
be absorbed every day in wondering all the forenoon 
whether the curate Vill come over in the afternoon, 
In all the nonsense that lovers talk, there is no- 
thing so common or so nonsensical as the resolution 
that when they are married they will live in some 
charming nest far remote from the busy haunts of 
men. The truth is that a young married woman 
is just the last person in the world who ought to 
be left neighbourless. Accustomed all her life to 
the pleasant talk of her mother, and the stimu- 
lating disputatiousness of her younger sisters, she 
is utterly lonely as soon as her lord gets back 
again into his groove of work which he has tempo- 
rarily left for the purposes of the honeymoon. The 
charming nest becomes a very palace of boredom 
and weariness ; and she may even find herself com- 
mitting the monstrous crime of half-wishing her- 
self at home again among the polite wranglings of 
her unmarried sisters, who at all events kept her 
from being dull. It is very charming to think of 
the moon rising over the pine-tops, but the moon 
does not rise over the pine-tops in the daytime; 
and the scent of flowers, always delicious in itself, 
does not count for friends and companions. Even 
breezy downs and woods will not make up for lack 

p2 



212 Studies in Conduct. 

of human voices. It is not everybody who has 
such a passion for nature as to be able to make 
friends with a great black down, or a forest of pine- 
trees, or a clump of high- standing beeches. There 
are people who can strike up companionships of 
this sort with every inanimate object, from the 
wide sea, down to the daisy nodding its head in the 
sun. But such people are not very numerous. To 
be able to feel this friendship for objects that make 
no articulate response is exclusively the mark of 
the poetic nature, and young ladies, though ready 
to compose any number of the sweetest verses, are 
at bottom thoroughly prosaic. 

Men, like women, do not always find life in the 
country so perfectly blissful as they supposed. The 
gardener is a sore tribulation and thorn in the 
flesh. The graceful contempt with which he treats 
any suggestion you may be bold enough to make 
about your own wishes respecting your own garden, 
the compassionate smile with which he listens to 
any notion you may have got from a horticultural 
treatise, the rapidity with which he demolishes any 
disposition on the part of his employer to give 
himself any little airs — in short, all the character- 
istics of a superior person, help to make the garden 
less a delight than a place of torment. He handles 
your humblest remark in a way which proves to 
you what a very silly and ignorant person you 
must be ; and with this pleasant conviction about 



Rural Delights, 213 

yourself, you retreat, humiliated and crestfallen, 
into your library, or else feel constrained to rush 
off to town, where the contempt of the master you 
employ follows you, and makes you feel foolish and 
uncomfortable half the day. The only plan for 
getting any peace and comfort out of your garden 
is to surrender it gracefully and without conten- 
tion. If he is never interfered with, never ad- 
vised nor requested nor questioned about things, 
the gardener may prove a very affable man, occa- 
sionally descending from his pedestal to let you 
know what he is going to do with this or that, in 
a really gracious and patronizing manner, which 
makes you feel as pleased and honoured as a school- 
boy does when his master speaks to him on general 
subjects in the peculiar pedagogic fashion of con- 
descension. 

Then, just as the gardener is so very much too 
good, the other men in the place are very much 
too bad. The village joiner, the plumber, the plas- 
terer, the man who has a vague and altogether 
fictitious reputation for " doing things " about the 
house and the stables — these exasperate you as 
much by their vices as the gentleman in the hot- 
house by his abominable virtue. One of the 
greatest charms about a country-house is that there 
is always something which wants doing. The 
master of the house is kept in a steady-flowing 
stream of excitement about little repairs. Pipes, 



214 Studies in Conduct. 

cisterns, tanks, drains, flues, furnish a never-failing 
pretext for invasions of torpid masons and plumb- 
ers. As soon as the smoke has been persuaded to 
go peaceably up the chimney, the water refuses 
to flow into the tank, or else it refuses to flow out 
of the tank except by taking the newly-papered 
drawing-room wall en route. When the mason is 
sent for, you learn that, like Balbus in the exercise- 
book, he is building a house with his own hand, 
six miles off; or else like Balbus's friend Cams, he 
has gone into the city for the sake of purchasing. 
Then you have moles in your meadow, and rats in 
your hay-stack, and you have the pleasure of seeing 
the little mounds in the one and the little holes in 
the other go on rapidly increasing for days and 
days until it suits the good pleasure of the man 
who " does things " to bring his mole-traps and 
his ferrets. Then, again, bills are a great trouble, 
not from their amount, but from their impenetrable 
intricacy. Why should one find put all in one 
line a man's labour for a day and a quarter, four 
pounds of green paint, and three feet of half- inch 
board, in all amounting to seven shillings and 
eightpence ? How is a plain man to disentangle a 
statement of this sort, so as to know how much he 
pays for green paint, how much for the half-inch 
board, and how much for the day and quarter of 
the man — whom, by the way, he only remembers 
to have seen at work for a couple of hours one 



Rural Delights. 215 

afternoon ? Of course it is impossible, and all pay- 
ments of this sort must be made simply on the 
strength of faith. This is evidently a very un- 
pleasant principle for people with a financial mind. 

Still the plain man may console himself that at 
least he gets all his vegetables for nothing. But it 
is ten to one that he will one day unluckily make 
this vaunt to some cold-hearted political economist 
from London, who will ruthlessly prove to him that 
each stick of asparagus costs him on an average 
about eightpence, each cucumber several shillings, 
and so on in proportion down to the humblest ve- 
getable that grows. Cicero says that many very 
remarkable philosophers were so unable to endure 
the manners either of the people or its leaders, that 
they went to live in the country, delectati re sua 
familiari. In our time, as it happens, the very 
remarkable philosopher is a sympathizer with the 
mores populi. But the less remarkable philosopher 
may perhaps find that, so far from being delighted 
with his domestic arrangements and the dwellers 
in the fields, both are much more unendurable than 
their counterparts would have proved if he had 
stayed in town. 

It is not to be denied that rural life, in those 
who are only trying their 'prentice hands at it, 
tends to develop the virtue of hospitality to a very 
high degree of perfection indeed. Perhaps it 
would be truer to say that it develops one half of 



2i 6 Studies in Conduct. 

it, and makes^us more eager to welcome the coming, 
than to speed the parting guest. Nobody is ever 
so welcome in town as the man who comes down 
to a country place laden with papers and all sorts 
of gossip. If we used to find him dull and com- 
monplace, his character and conversation have now 
about them an unequalled savour and piquancy. 
If he used to be a chattering bore, he is now the 
most amusing and instructive of companions. 

Yet, for all this, for people with sufficient force 
of character (and of a certain kind of character) to 
be able to live a great deal upon their own re- 
sources, th,e country is by far the most congenial 
home. They find all sorts of new sympathies 
arise, and their whole sense of the companionship 
of nature is at once quickened and gratified. The 
very monotony of dark heaths and green fields and 
hedgerows is imposing, and it is the more imposing 
to a man who learns the infinite change of growth 
and colour and form which is constantly at work 
under this seeming monotony. Every process of 
nature, from the slow stately progress of masses of 
cloud down to the fierce contests of the tiny adders 
on a pond-edge, and the battles of insects in the 
sun, becomes interesting and suggestive, and a 
man of a certain sort positively luxuriates in the 
contemplation of the incessant life and growth 
and decay about him. This consciousness of never- 
ending movement around him far more than com- 



Rural Delights, 21 7 

pensates for the minute vexations incident to life 
in places where the civilized organization of towns 
has not reached. But then people of another sort 
find the vexations far weightier than the joys, and 
they only think that a man must be an idiot for 
preferring partially uncomfortable isolation to the 
life of the city. So he would be if he were like 
themselves. 





XXII. 



TOWN AND COUNTRY. 




T has been recently suggested in a fash- 
ionable newspaper that all the London 
people who have only moderate inde- 
pendent incomes should immediately 
go away, and live in the towns and villages of the 
country. They would be so much better off there, 
if they only knew it. In London or its suburbs 
they have to pay enormous house-rent, they are 
not even acquainted with their next-door neigh- 
bours, and they are positive nobodies. If they 
would only go to those hundred charming country 
towns and villages which, as it is, are steadily on 
the decrease in population and prosperity, they 
would mix with other families, would have no dif- 
ficulty in marrying off their daughters, would en- 
joy better health, would save money, and in ever 
so many other ways would find themselves happier 



Town and Country. 219 

and better off. They would also have the satisfac- 
tion of knowing that they were doing more good 
in the world. The charming country towns would 
be equally improved by this infusion of " maiden 
ladies and widows with small incomes, officers on 
half-pay, and retired tradesmen of moderate for- 
tune." To a dispassionate observer, we may con- 
fess, the ordinary country town seems even now to 
have more than enough of these desirable residents. 
With the addition of the lawyer, the half-dozen 
clergymen, and doctors, and a bank-manager or 
two, the whole fashionable population appears to 
be made up of maiden ladies and widows with 
small incomes, and retired tradesmen of moderate 
fortune. Still the proposal of so tremendous a 
measure of emigration is worth thinking about. 
Very few people, except those who are too busy 
to give their minds to it, are quite contented with 
the place in which they are living. If in the town, 
men and women complain of expense and dirt and 
noise. When they get into the country, they suffer 
ten times more from a deadly and dismal dulness 
which must be felt to be understood. Nothing 
can be sillier than the attempts sometimes made 
to settle in a decisive way the relative advantages 
of life in London and in the provinces — life in 
towns and life among the fields and lanes. Still, 
before the genteel emigrants from Bloomsbury and 
Highbury accept the advice with which they have 



220 Studies in Conduct, 

been favoured, and hasten away into the country- 
towns, it would be well for them to strike some 
sort of balance between what they give up and 
what they hope to get in return. 

There are two great and obvious advantages 
about living in London, to old ladies and retired 
gentlemen who have no work or business. In the 
first place, they may do whatever they like, short 
of getting into the police-courts and the papers, 
without any apprehension of being talked about. 
Certainly, if a widow with a small income habi- 
tually drove up to her own door at one or two in 
the morning in a noisy Hansom, she would pro- 
bably be conscious that she was the subject of 
much tattle in the street. But, as a rule, people 
who live in London are very happy to mind their 
own business, and to leave their neighbours alone. 
In these charming country towns, on the other 
hand, anybody would be thought grossly wanting 
in his or her duty to society who failed to take the 
keenest interest in the affairs of everybody else in 
the place. Income, family, past history, personal 
habits, are all registered in a great uuwritten re- 
cord with the minute precision of a census paper. 
You cannot expect to have all this delightful infor- 
mation about your neighbours without conferring 
the same gratification upon them in turn with re- 
spect to yourself. They must have their quid pro 
quo. One of the great advantages of the proposed 



Town and Country. 221 

emigration would be the stimulus which it would 
give to these sociological inquiries. If some enter- 
prising person were to lead a colony of fifty old 
widows, or fifty retired tradesmen, with their fa- 
milies, to settle in one of these delightful stagnant 
towns, the effect upon the intellect of the place 
could only be compared to that of a movement 
like the Renaissance, or the Revival of Letters. 
The mind of the oldest inhabitant would be stirred 
to its lowest depths, and a development of the ac- 
quisitive and inventive faculties would take place 
such as it had never entered into the heart of man 
to conceive. This would be delicious to the coun- 
try town, but a man bred in cities would probably 
not relish the notion of having himself and his af- 
fairs made the occasion of a great renaissance. Still 
less would he relish the vigilant tyranny which 
minute tattle is sure to breed. In the charm- 
ing country town a single step out of the beaten 
path of rustic etiquette is certain to lead to a more 
or less prompt excommunication. The tyranny of 
opinion in a city is often bad enough, but in vil- 
lages and decaying towns it is worse to an incredi- 
ble degree. Suppose the new settler objects to the 
length of the morning service, and so does not go 
to church as often as his neighbours ; or let him 
be known to have a copy of a heterodox book in 
his house, or to express the accursed Laodicean 
doctrine that a man should be allowed without in- 



222 Studies in Conduct, 

terference to believe what seems best to him. He 
will very speedily find himself quite as lonely as if 
he had stopped in his mother- country in Blooms- 
bury, with the exception that some old lady will 
most likely feel it a solemn duty to deal faithfully 
with him from time to time, and warn him ho- 
nestly of the evil place for which he is preparing 
himself. 

Even if he should offend rustic laws no more 
deeply than by liveliness of manner and by a 
sprightly way of talking, his punishment will be 
fully as great as he can bear. Liveliness is a dis- 
tinct breach of good manners in a country town. 
It is vulgar and ostentatious. It is a sign of 
shallowness and flippancy of character. It proves 
clearly that a man is superficial and conceited, 
and has never mixed in really good society. It is 
a wicked outrage put upon the great God of Dul- 
ness. A brilliant man accidentally stranded, even 
for a week, in the society of a charming country 
town, hurts the delicate sensitiveness of the resi- 
dents as keenly as if he were to carry off their fa- 
mily plate. His jests and good things are received 
with deprecatory mildness by the more amiable 
part of his listeners, but by the rest with indigna- 
tion and hatred. The men look at him half sto- 
lidly, half sullenly, and the ladies with an air of 
feeble discomfort. It may be said that widows 
with small incomes and retired tradesmen with 



Town and Country. 223 

moderate fortunes usually want neither to avoid 
going to church nor to be brilliant, which is quite 
true. But the dullest people who have lived in 
busy places all their lives acquire a strongish de- 
sire to be allowed to do as they please, as well as 
occasionally to be amused, and to have the mono- 
tony of their lives relieved. 

This utter lack of means of amusement or mo- 
derate excitement is the second point in which de- 
cayed country towns, charming though they be, 
are inferior to a metropolis for people who are out 
of active business. In London one may not know 
one's next-door neighbour, which is an appalling 
idea to the rural mind, and gives it the most ef- 
fectual notion of the vastness of this overgrown 
city. And London people are not too sociable, 
nor too ready to receive as an intimate acquaint- 
ance anybody whom they know nothing about. 
But in London a man may have scarcely any 
friends, and still find his life interesting enough. 
There is the newspaper every morning, and there 
are the theatres, and there are the parks and the 
streets. In a country place most men's interest 
even in the news grows stagnant, and the local 
journal once a week, or a look now and then at 
the Times, is found quite sufficient to satisfy their 
curiosity as to the outside world. The atmosphere 
is wholly unfavourable to a habit of taking interest 
in things. Of course there is no theatre, or, if 



224 Studies in Conduct. 

there be one, there is no company; and, if. there 
were both, there is a vague persuasion still linger- 
ing in these waste places of the earth that theatres 
are wrong. As to the want of acquaintances in a 
big city, a man must have a very curiously consti- 
tuted miud who would not think it a far more 
convivial sort of thing to walk about some of the 
great London streets, with their shops and crowds 
of people, and horses and carriages, than to go 
through the dismal ceremonies which mark the hos- 
pitalities of small towns in the country. 

For young ladies, indeed, such places abound 
with inexhaustible sources of joy. The charming 
country town has generally plenty of churches, 
and this implies a good stock of curates constantly 
on hand. The most acrimonious member of the 
Liberation Society might admit that the Church 
has its uses if he could but see the blessings which 
half-a-dozen pleasant and sociable curates bring to 
the young ladies of a decayed town. They orga- 
nize the most delightful choral societies, which, 
meeting once or twice a week, combine the excite- 
ment of the Opera with the flirtation of an evening 
party, and yet add to both the delights of piety, 
because chants and bits out of oratorios alternate 
with glees and madrigals. Then the young ladies 
and the curates take sweet counsel together over 
the coals, and the blankets, and the sick people 
who want good talk and port-wine. The book- 



Town and Country. %%$ 

club is another admirable field for diversion. The 
struggle which goes on between the fast or mildly 
free-thinking members and the clergy, on the 
knotty point whether any book in the faintest de- 
gree interesting should be sent for, is almost as 
capital an opportunity for flirting as the bits of 
oratorio and the glees. The discussion of books, 
too, gives room for an interchange of what both 
parties to it take for ideas; and when young la- 
dies and curates begin to interchange ideas, it is 
time for any mother with sound views about cu- 
rates to interfere peremptorily. Life in a country 
town that is well supplied with curates is no sine- 
cure to the meritorious mother. It is true, as the 
fashionable instructor says, that she " marries off 
her daughters without difficulty." But she could 
do that in London if she were not too particular 
about her son-in-law's income and prospects. 

A great many people who have no tie to Lon- 
don, or any other large and busy town, go and 
bury themselves in remote solitudes, with the idea 
that they are taking the best means to lead a sim- 
ple and contemplative life. And most of us, when 
on a spring or autumn walk through fine country, 
have felt a passing desire to do the same. All 
looks so fresh and tranquil. Yet there are very 
few cases in which this plan of life does not prove 
a failure. Not every man has such depth of re- 
source within himself that he can endure isola- 

Q 



226 Studies in Conduct. 

tion from society without growing morose and dull. 
Tf he is a great philosopher or a thoroughly stupid 
person, he may try the experiment with success. 
But if he is only of ordinary temper, the mono- 
tony of a rural life to which he has not always 
been accustomed has the worst effect. He fur- 
nishes his library with good books, and orders his 
papers and reviews to be sent regularly, and has a 
garden and a cow or two and a pig or two^ and he 
means to ask a friend to stay with him twice or 
thrice a year. The whole thing is delightful for a 
month. He reads and takes his exercise, and gazes 
meditatively at the cows at their grazing and the 
pigs grubbing in their troughs, and he feels that 
he is communing with nature, and is leading the 
life of one of her truest sons. But by-and-by com- 
muning with nature becomes a bore. The cows 
and pigs are all very well, but they have no views, 
and they cannot communicate ideas. The news- 
paper, which at first was rather snubbed, gets 
more and more precious, and the advertisements 
of the play and the operas and the railway trips 
seem the most valuable part of it. Finally, the 
foolish man who thought he had much goods laid up 
for himself gives up the remote solitude ; or else, 
if he is perverse as well as foolish, he clings to it, 
and brings his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave 
by sheer monotony and crushing dulness of life. 
It is scarcely less of a mistake for anybody who 



Town and Country. izj 

has to live most of the year in one spot to pitch 
his tent in a surpassingly beautiful country. The 
country seats of great people may be wisely placed 
in the richest scenery that can be found, because 
great people are constantly moving about from place 
to place. But rich scenery is apt to become cloy- 
ing. A house between a fir- wood and a dark heath 
is much more likely to be a place of permanent 
pleasure than one placed in the midst of glorious 
trees and graceful undulations, and fine park-land 
with superb views. All these are meant to stimu- 
late the mind of the spectator, but they cease to 
stimulate when we know every point by heart, 
and see the same splendour every morning before 
breakfast, and at lunch, and in afternoon rides or 
walks all the year long. On the whole, a wise 
man will not leave the city too far away, but will 
say with the poet : — 

" Not wholly in the busy world nor quite 
Beyond it blooms the garden that I love : 
News from the humming city comes to it 
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
And sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
The windy clanging of the minster clock." 

This is much better, for anybody who does not 
want his mind to go to sleep, than sequestered dells 
where you get the newspaper two days old, where 
there are no railways, and where your nearest 
friend lives a dozen or twenty miles away. Such 
places are only meant for tourists and farmers. 

Q 2 




XXIII. 



IMAGINATION AND CONDUCT. 




T is a very common mistake to attri- 
bute to coldness and badness of heart 
what is really due to nothing more 
criminal than an entire want of ima- 
People more often rudely disregard the 
feelings and situation of others from inability to 
picture with any accuracy what is not immediately 
and palpably under their own eye, than from a 
base resolution to pursue their objects at any cost 
to their friends and neighbours. They have no 
sympathy with disappointment and wounded affec- 
tion and all the other similar forms of mental 
pain, simply because they are themselves uncon- 
scious of such sensations, and they have not the 
faculty which would quicken them into realizing 
the possibility of this pain in others. They say 



Imagination and Conduct. 229 

and do harsh and unsympathetic things, out of a 
sheer incapacity to see any but their most direct 
outside consequences. The immense power of ima- 
gination as a moral agent is almost invariably over- 
looked in the current domestic theories of moral 
education. Everybody sees how closely it lies 
about the root of art, how essential it is alike to 
the composition and the enjoyment of poetry, 
painting, and, above all, of music ; but not every- 
body has persuaded himself that imagination plays 
a scarcely less important part in conduct. Take 
from the character and acts of the best men and 
women what is due to the operation of the imagi- 
native faculties, and you would have left but few 
of the highest kind of good motives and fine traits. 
From this it follows, that the present leaning of 
educational theories towards a severe repression 
of the imagination in favour of the purely scien- 
tific form of mind is a leaning which is far from 
having all the arguments on its own side. Scien- 
tific training teaches the invaluable habits of test- 
ing all statements, and weighing evidence, and 
preferring truth above all other considerations; 
but it would be a distinct misfortune if excessive 
and narrow cultivation of the scientific spirit were 
to displace the imaginative temper, which is the 
very source and spring of so many moral excel- 
lences. The quick and many-sided sensibility 
which is the result of a cultivated imagination, as 



230 Studies in Conduct. 

a thousand instances have proved, is perfectly com- 
patible with the strictest philosophic temper. The 
aim of man, as an inquirer and in the intellectual 
order of things, is truth; as a being with social 
instincts and obligations, his aim is Beneficence 
and Humanity. It is obvious that neither of these 
in the least degree clashes with the other. But 
we can very easily believe that, if schoolmasters 
were to teach science in the narrow, ungenial, dry- 
bones fashion in which so many of them now teach 
ancient literature, the effect on the mind of a stu- 
dent with not more than average natural suscep- 
tibility or enthusiasm would be fatally injurious to 
the health of the imagination, and not less so there- 
fore to social conduct. It will be an exceedingly 
evil day when little boys and girls are regaled with 
mathematical puzzles, and experiments with the 
lever and the pulley, to the detriment of fairy tales 
and romances. For, although the effect of the 
highest scientific knowledge is to quicken and ex- 
pand the imagination, this is not by any means 
the case when the knowledge is confined to the 
stiff and apparently arid and inelastic elements. 
A lad who came away from school with only the 
same amount of appreciation of science as he com- 
monly has of the classics, would be even more 
starved than he is now in the imaginative region 
of his mind. 

Considering that the comparative weakness of the 



Imagination and Conduct. 231 

humane sentiments is the chief cause of the most 
prominent as well as the most deep-seated miseries 
that prevail throughout the world, and not least 
of all in our own country, nothing can he more 
valuable than an idea which sheds any light upon 
the source of ordinary inhumanity. And this too 
generally neglected truth that much cruelty and 
harshness in conduct is the result of defective ima- 
gination, has the important practical merit of sub- 
stituting an accessible for an inaccessible cause. 
If you attribute a harsh or unfeeling act to innate 
malevolence or incurable natural coldness of dis- 
position, there is an end of the matter. The harsh 
person must be left to his miserable fate, and so 
too must those unfortunate beings who happen to 
be under his influence or in his power. He is 
what he is by the visitation of God. But it is of 
the essence of what has been called Rationalism 
in all departments of thought to abandon this be- 
lief in the secret and unchangeable evil properties 
of the human heart. We no longer believe that 
insanity is the consequence of the presence of an 
evil demon, who has taken bodily possession of its 
victim. And a rational analysis persuades us in 
the same way that an austere, unsympathetic, un- 
feeling disposition is not an absolute and final 
quality of character into which we need inquire 
no further; but that, on the contrary, it only im- 
plies the presence of a number of unfavourable 



232 Studies in Conduct, 

mental conditions, the most prominent of which is 
torpor of imagination. Innate badness of heart 
you cannot reach. A slumbering faculty of intel- 
lect you can reach. If anybody chooses to say, as 
wicked Caligulas have said, that to inflict torture 
of body or anguish of mind positively gives him 
pleasure, you can do nothing with him in the way 
of argument. The only course with a wretch of 
this sort is to put the gratification of his monstrous 
pleasures out of his reach. 

But most people who pass for harsh and unfeel- 
ing would deny, and with perfect sincerity, that 
the infliction of pain is other than highly distaste- 
ful to them. Their fault is that they do not see or 
understand the pain which they cause. Children, 
for instance, are nearly all cruel, and for the reason 
that they are, from their years, scarcely able to 
know what cruelty means. Their barbarous tor- 
mentings of flies and toads and cats, and most 
other sentient beings on which they can lay their 
hands, are only the result of an ignorant sportive- 
ness. They have no notion of the thrills of agony 
which their reckless humour sends along the qui- 
vering nerves of the victim. Parents too often con- 
tent themselves with a simple prohibition, either 
very stern or else very mild and appealing, instead 
of trying to awaken a vivid consciousness of what 
these torn flies and mutilated toads endure. Boys 
and girls desist from these atrocities when they are 



Imagination and Conduct. 2^ 

old enough to find out for themselves that pain is 
a bad thing. But, besides the horrors which they 
inflict on birds and insects, are those with which 
they torment one another, or rather with which 
the dull and blunt torment the few among them 
who are keenly sensitive. In this case they see 
plainly that they cause pain, but they have no 
distinct picture of what they are doing. And it 
is the same with them when they grow up. Per- 
sons with blunt sensibilities and sluggish imagina- 
tions know that this or that .thing is sure to be 
disagreeable to others, because they can tell the 
outward signs of pain and mortification. Only, 
their conception of pain is so dull, and corre- 
sponds so imperfectly and scantily with the reality, 
as to have no restraining power over their con- 
duct. 

In all cases of this kind, exhortations to bene- 
volence and considerateness and mercy only fall 
with a fraction of their due weight. Those to 
whom they are addressed understand too dimly 
what you mean by your very terms. They require 
definition, and the only way of making the defi- 
nition intelligible is to kindle some flame in the 
imagination, to impress upon them that their own 
capacities and susceptibilities are not the measure 
of the universe, to quicken in them the idea that 
there are unnumbered fine shades of passion and 
feeling and sensibility, each of which it is the busi- 



234 Studies in Conduct, 

ness of the humane to take into account, and make 
proper allowance for. 

Besides this, it is needless to say that there are 
a hundred other sides of conduct in which imagi- 
nation plays a powerful though often unobserved 
part, and to which the imagination lends a cha- 
racteristic colour. The more this faculty of the 
mind is quickened and developed, the more dis- 
tinct the leaning towards what is generous and 
lofty. Take those thousands of British households 
where a mistaken and dwarfing conception of reli- 
gion has invested the bare notion of a richly cul- 
tivated imagination with all that is perilous and 
wicked — where the drama is spoken of as a choice 
device for ensnaring souls, where pictures are held 
to be vain gewgaws, novels to be pestilent diver- 
sions from the pursuit of salvation, and poetry to 
be very frivolous and dangerous as soon as it quits 
the bounds prescribed by the imagination of Dr. 
Watts. The grey, colourless life which comes of 
this theory is too well known, and so are the often 
disastrous rebellions against the theory on the part 
of its younger victims. The profligacy of the sons 
of too austere fathers is an old story. Minds with 
any elasticity or fertility or impulse cannot tole- 
rate these stiff, narrow bounds. They long for an 
atmosphere of growth and movement, and, as they 
do not find it in any form of virtue with which 
they are acquainted, they very commonly seek it 



Imagination and Conduct. i 35 

in the more genial shape which vice may present. 
The powers of imagination which might have been 
made the very salt of character only serve to hurry 
the character the more rapidly to degradation. 
The mental ruin of the profligate is not so very 
much worse than the mental ruin of the prig, ex- 
cept in the external ruin which the former com- 
monly entails into the bargain. Each loses that 
happy expansiveness of nature which is one of the 
traits that make a man's character worth most both 
to himself and other people, and of which a rich 
and vigorous imagination is the chief root and 
source. 

It is rather mournful to think how many wretches 
there are whose only glimpses of these heights of 
soul are got through the evil agency of gin, whose 
only moments when such dim glimpses are possible 
are those when all the rest of the intellect except 
imagination has been lulled into a fatal slumber. 
Whether any of these visions of higher possibilities 
survive the clearing away of the spirituous mist is 
a question which the wise man will not undertake 
to decide. With these unfortunate souls, as with 
other people, the imagination takes some of its 
colour and bias from outside conditions; but its 
effect is to make them brighter and more endu- 
rable, at least so long as the imagination is at 
work. Even faint and momentary insights of this 
sort are better than an unbroken level of sordid 



236 Studies in Conduct. 

and hideous existence. But when culture and op- 
portunity make the habitual and wise exercise of 
the imagination possible, there is scarcely anything 
else so certain to elevate all the springs and im- 
pulses of conduct. 




XXIV. 



COLLOQUIAL FALLACIES. 




iOST people are disposed to think, in 
their inmost consciousness, that they 
can talk well under certain circum- 
stances. Only unfortunately, in the 
majority of cases, those circumstances which are 
the fostering nurses of good conversation are never 
to be found, except in more or less strict privacy. 
And, after all, a man must be a very poor creature 
indeed who cannot say things which they of his 
household, at least, will take to be full of point 
and brilliance. The " petty tyrant of the fireside" 
can generally ensure both attention and applause 
for the oracular wisdom that it is his august plea- 
sure to dispense. When the circle of listeners is 
enlarged, and family partiality or family servility 
ceases to work, he may be conscious that he is 
making no mark, except the mark of the bore. 



238 Studies in Conduct. 

Still the man reflects that there are different 
classes of talkers ; that there is one glory of the 
sun and another glory of the moon; and that 
while some men shine brightest in society, there 
are others whom only an esoteric audience can 
appreciate or bring out to their best. Then there 
are others who, finding themselves unable to talk 
well, or, perhaps, even unable to talk at all among 
men, recover their own esteem by the conviction 
that they can talk agreeably and fluently to wo- 
men. In the discussions of their own sex about 
books, or politics, or horses, or wine, even though 
not devoid of knowledge or opinion, they are 
cursed with a tormenting dumbness that always 
prevents them from saying anything which is both 
worth saying in itself, and precisely to the point 
as well. But among ladies they are unrivalled. 
They can make way with the very dullest and 
most unspeakably insipid of these enchanting 
creatures. At a slow dinner-party, or in the in- 
tervals of the dance, they prattle to their partners 
like a giant rejoicing to run his course. This is 
their grand arena. Other men may, if they will, 
discourse powerfully in the House of Commons, or 
in club bow-windows, or among theologians and 
scholars. But not for all their triumphs of the 
tongue would the genuine ladyV man exchange 
his own skill and success. It must be admitted 
that talking to women is, as a rule, a much more 



Colloquial Fallacies. 1 59 

difficult thing to do than talking to men. The 
majority alike of men and women are horribly va- 
pid on nearly every subject but some one or two 
in which their own interests are centred. But 
women are more vapid than men, because they are 
not even supposed to feel any interest in most of 
the things which make the material of good con- 
versation. With a man, one always has the com- 
mon ground of the newspaper. The dullest of 
men can generally get fairly hold of the one idea 
set forth in a leading article, and this gives him 
a sort of impetus. Ladies, on the other hand, 
don't even get so much as this. And, in conse- 
quence of the conventional restraint put upon all 
their ideas and chances of acquiring ideas, they 
do not catch more than half the allusions in which, 
as distinguished from elaborate statements, good 
talk always abounds. The allusions have to be 
explained, with the same effect as decanting soda- 
water. Remembering all this, we are bound to 
confess that the pride of the man who can talk 
well to ladies is not unjust or exaggerated. The 
knack of making bricks without straw, of being 
able to go on talking about absolutely nothing, is 
one of the most admirable of social gifts. Per- 
haps, in the case of young ladies, at any rate, the 
boundary line between agreeable talk and adroit 
flirtation is not very accurately marked. A little 
spice of flirtation is a wonderful improvement to 



240 Studies in Conduct. 

talk in the eyes of the average young lady of com- 
mon life. 

The most spurious, as well as the most preten- 
tious kind of good talker is the man who talks 
magazines. If anybody chooses to give his mind 
to it, this is a very easy road to a certain sort of 
conversational success — a fact which may account 
for its comparative popularity. It is an especially 
favourite method among college dons. The author 
of the s Student's Manual/ or somebody of the 
same stamp, assures every young man that, if he 
will only read five verses of the Greek Testament 
each morning after breakfast all through life, he 
will retain his hold at once on the niceties of the 
Greek tongue and on the verities of the Christian 
faith. On something like the same principle, a 
conversational don believes that half an hour spent 
religiously every afternoon in the magazine-room 
of the Union will eventually make a man the most 
successful talker of his age. Of course it is not 
enough to run your eye over the popular English 
magazines. All the world does this. It is in 
some of the French and German, and even Ame- 
rican periodicals, that the finest veins are to be dis- 
covered. Here the ingenious and industrious ex- 
plorer constantly " strikes ile.," and of the very 
best quality. Foreign periodicals abound much 
more freely than our own in new views, astound- 
ing interpretations, outrageous rehabilitations, and 



Colloquial Fallacies. 241 

overwhelming hypotheses. To advance one of 
these, with a few of what the author took for 
proofs and arguments, may establish a reputation 
for a whole evening. But then the process must 
be conducted with judgment. The subject has to 
be easily brought up, though some masters of this 
art prefer the bolder method of seizing an early 
pause in the conversation, and at once launching 
forth into the middle of things. It is very desira- 
ble, if possible, that the subject should be one of 
which the listeners know a little, but not too 
much. They are thus tempted to offer bits of cri- 
ticism, which the conversationalist, having got up 
his theme, demolishes in a most masterly manner. 
Of course, all this must be done gracefully and 
without assumption. The art of dissembling your 
art is as requisite in conversation as in anything 
else, and it is as useful in artificial as in really 
good conversation. But in spite of its temporary 
success, talk, which is the result of special cram, 
has no place in the true art. Men who cram 
themselves for talking purposes are like women 
who resort to the rouge-pot, and wear false hair. 
Both painted women and crammed men may be 
very pleasant people in their way. Society, per* 
haps, could not get on without them ; and it is a 
great blunder to fly into a passion with the vanity 
which prompts a recourse to false pretences. Still, 
men who habitually let off magazine articles over 

R 



242 Studies in Conduct. 

wine, or in walks with their friends, should learn 
that they are not true talkers, any more than a 
copyist is an artist, or a translator of books a crea- 
tive author. 

A small class of men of a polemic turn of mind 
mistake disputation and argument for talk. They 
do not care for any conversation which does not 
somehow or other develop an issue, a position 
which is open to more than one view. A good 
talk to them is pretty nearly synonymous with a 
hot and close argumentation. They are like those 
mythical Americans who go through the world as 
roaring lions, seeking free rights. People, in their 
view, only meet for the sharp encounter of native 
wits. The quiet, easy flow of talk is a tame, dull 
waste of precious time, that ought to have been 
spent in assertion and replication, in rejoinder and 
rebutter and surrebutter, in quick clenching and 
rapid refutation. A couple of people of this dispu- 
tatious temper may prove as outrageous a nuisance 
as the most pompous conversational autocrat that 
ever lived and talked. It is highly proper to be 
anxious for truth. If you hear anybody say the 
thing that is not, or that in your opinion is not, 
and if you have a short and decisive confutation 
easily within reach, then it is well to lay on, and 
not to spare. But a sustained duel is a sheer 
vexation to calm overlookers. Instead of trusting 
that right may win, they sigh in vain for the de- 



Colloquial Fallacies. 243 

scent of some just angel, who should inflict upon 
the disputants the fate of the Kilkenny' cats. As 
De Quincy says, in speaking of Dr. Parr's rude- 
nesses in this direction, " mere good sense is suffi- 
cient, without any experience at all of high life, to 
point out the intolerable absurdity of allowing two 
angry champions to lock up and sequestrate, as it 
were, the whole sociable enjoyment of a large 
party, and compel them to sit, c in sad civility/ 
witnesses of a contest which can interest the ma- 
•ority neither by its final object nor its manage- 
ment." 

Now and then, it is true, one meets a fool so 
hollow and so pretentious that it is impossible 
to resist the temptation of having a throw with 
him. But even in such a case as this, the execu- 
tion ought to be swift and certain. If you can 
impose absolute silence on your fool, it may be 
worth while to spend a little time and trouble 
in dispatching him. But if he be one of those 
lively fools who can skip to and fro with the cele- 
rity and heartiness of that ignoble but tormenting 
insect which can leap a hundred times the length 
of its own body, who is no sooner expelled from 
one corner than he has entrenched himself in 
another, then it is much the better plan to leave 
him to disport at his ease. And though an en- 
counter between a blockhead and a philosopher 
may, under certain conditions, be amusing and 

R 2 



244 Studies in Conduct. 

useful, an encounter between two philosophers in 
society is a distinct absurdity. 

There is a peculiar form of the affectation of 
good talk, especially prevalent in our own time. 
If one were engaged in classifying the popular 
fallacies about colloquial excellence, this might be 
called the Dark Lantern Fallacy. It consists in 
suddenly shooting down upon the conversation 
with a sharp explosive sentence, which is uttered 
in a couple of seconds, but whose influence upon 
the talkers is much more enduring. This is very 
useful at times. To let a ray of light into a dis- 
cussion by a keen paradox may be to do excellent 
service. But paradox may readily be carried too 
far. The knack is easily acquired, and this is in 
itself a presumption against it. The youngest 
undergraduate is nowadays often master of the 
art of saying these pungent, half-true, and wholly 
exaggerated things. The prime secret of the art 
consists in being entirely without reverence. Of 
the men who have won reputations by these tren- 
chant, far-shooting interpolations in talk, the most 
have earned their laurels by the simple trick of 
bringing something that most people look upon 
with respect or awe into juxtaposition with some- 
thing else that is ludicrous and petty. This is 
amusing enough as far as it goes. The Philistines 
and reverential folks have so much of their own 
way in the world, that the occasional epigram 



Colloquial Fallacies. 245 

which tempers their despotism cannot be anything 
but welcome. The worst of it is that the applause 
which rewards the man who suddenly lets out a 
keen ray, and then shuts his light up, lying subtly 
in wait for his next chance, is very likely to make 
him think a great deal better of himself than he is 
at all justified in doing. For six epigrams in an 
evening do not make a good talker. And men, or 
rather lads, of this stamp —for men find the com- 
parative worthlessness of the knack — are apt to 
forget the difference between a keen epigram, a 
vigorous antithesis, or a hissing paradox, on the 
one hand, and mere pertness and flippancy on the 
other. It would take a very long time to classify 
all the varieties of good talk, elevated or merely 
colloquial. Dr. Johnson was a good talker in one 
way, and Coleridge in another. Their styles are 
wide as the poles asunder. But each has charac- 
teristic merit in his style, and between them lie all 
sorts of shades and degrees. A man ought to be 
quite catholic in his views about good conversation. 
Only this does not prevent him from seeing that in 
society there is a great deal of dull, stupid, or pert 
mimicry of talk. Against display of vanity in this 
shape everybody should earnestly set his face. It 
is one of the most annoying of the minor social 
sins. 




XXY. 



NEW FRIENDS. 




HERE are very few things pleasanter 
than the sensation of awakening to 
find that one has got a new friend. 
We may retire any night with the 
consciousness of having been introduced to people 
whom we did not know before, of having had a 
day's pleasant chat with them, and with the anti- 
cipation of many more such chats in days to come. 
But nobody would dream of wasting the name of 
friend on acquaintances of this stamp, whose hold 
and establishment in our affections may perhaps 
be described by saying, that they are persons whom 
we should be very glad to have for railway com- 
panions in the journey down to Manchester or to 
Edinburgh, or whom we should like to sit next to 
at a dinner-party, or to have staying with us at a 
country-house. The mild Rochefoucauld of com- 



New Friends. 247 

mon life assures you that after the " first sprightly 
running" of life has ceased, you need not expect 
to find amid the dregs of your years any acquaint- 
ances who are more than this ; nay, that you are ex- 
ceptionally lucky in meeting with new persons who 
can even do so much as make a long journey in a 
railway carriage agreeable to you. And, of course, 
if the person thus solemnly warned is an exhausted 
wretch who has thrown away broadcast all the re- 
sources of life, instead of tending and hoarding 
them, and finds himself unable alike to feel his old 
joys or to adopt new ones, then the counsellings of 
the disbeliever in new friendships are as sound as 
any other. Also, if the man is of a temperament 
which has never at any time warmed with the emo- 
tions of the friend, he may very well be more than 
content if he only happens to fall in with agreeable 
acquaintances. It is of no use to argue about the 
more or less of light and colour with the blind, and 
a man who has never had old friends is not likely 
to understand the delight of discovering a new one. 
To be able to appreciate this he must have felt the 
solid truth of the good old commonplace about 
friendship, that it halves every pain and doubles 
every pleasure. Moody beings whose narrow and 
confined souls have kept both their joys and their 
pains to themselves are consistently as indifferent 
to the chance of a new friend as they would be to 
the chance of having shown to them a new land- 



248 Studies in Conduct. 

scape, if they had no taste for natural scenery. 
Still they may justly envy their more fortunate 
fellow-creatures who have this capacity for liking 
other people, and for inspiring a corresponding 
liking. 

It is no small thing, obviously, to find that, 
with no exertion of one's own, all our good pos- 
sessions have been doubled, and all our skeletons 
robbed of half their grimness, or half the ghosts 
that haunted us finally laid. Not that in this is 
involved the categorical enumeration either of all 
one's joys or all one's grievances, It is too often 
supposed by the blockheads who enter so painfully 
into the composition of society, that a friend is a 
person whom you may expect to give ear to long 
histories of your own private affairs without being 
bored, as he would be if he were not your friend. 
Considering that the number of people with a strong 
relish for being bored is naturally limited, it is not 
surprising that those who hold this theory are scep- 
tical whether there be any new friends or not. They 
do not see that it is in the consciousness of an oc- 
cult sympathy that the charm and consolation of 
friendship resides, not in being a more privileged 
and more intimate kind of gossiper. In the most 
delicate kinds of friendship, a man or a woman, 
who thinks about it at all, cannot help feeling as 
Aladdin may have felt when, after accidentally 
rubbing the magician's ring ; he first saw the ge- 



New Friends. 249 

nius of the ring appear, or when the genius of the 
lamp brought him delicious meats in golden ves- 
sels. There is an air of magic in the sudden per- 
fection with which it is found that a whole set of 
new sympathies have sprung up, and a whole body 
of new pleasures been added to the old stock. 

For the wise man knows that no effort is of itself 
enough to procure the gift. These affinities will 
not come by any amount of mere taking thought. 
Can anybody write out in form the various reasons 
which make him prefer one man or one woman to 
all, or even to some, other men and women ? The 
land that lies between love and aversion is broad 
enough, though it may sometimes be traversed 
with astounding swiftness. But it is not always 
easy, and in cases of very strong likings is scarcely 
ever possible, to explain why we stand to a given 
person in one attitude rather than the other. Of 
course a moralist with a character to keep up will 
lay you down a completely satisfactory and ex- 
haustive account of all the considerations which 
enter into just liking and disliking. You will 
never allow yourself, he is confident, to feel my 
affection or kindness for anybody into whose moral 
principles and theologic belief you have not pre- 
viously made a searching inquiry. Having ascer- 
tained that he pays his debts, goes to the right 
kind of church, never smokes, and talks deferen- 
tially of people in high places, then you may safely 



250 Studies in Conduct. 

let the torrent of your affections burst forth with 
all the impetuosity which so excellent a character 
is so admirably qualified to provoke. And simi- 
larly in the formation of friendships with women. 
If they confine themselves to the most correct sen- 
timents, and behave with that frigidity which is so 
truly gratifying to every well-regulated male mind, 
they are probably worthy of the rich and exuberant 
gifts of a well-regulated male friendship. But, to 
speak with respectful candour of the moralist, he 
barely covers the whole length and breadth of the 
matter. Unknown quantities of a force and mag- 
nitude which cannot be measured enter into his 
theoretically unimpeachable formula. There are 
tones of voice, and lights in the eye, and uncon- 
scious tricks of gait and movement, and expres- 
sions flitting across the face, which may have as 
much to do with one's kindness for a man or a 
woman, as the profoundest belief in the soundness 
of their principles or the unshaken consistency of 
their practice. 

The same undue predominance which is thus 
given to Pharisaic goodness is also, and even more 
frequently, given to intellectual cleverness. How 
often are we told that we are quite sure to be good 
friends with somebody, because he or she is so 
amazingly clever ? The breakdown of cleverness 
as a basis of friendship is even more conspicuous 
than that of goodness. In an ordinary way it 



New Friends. 251 

alienates far more than it reconciles. And there 
are curious diversities of opinion as to what con- 
stitutes cleverness. As a rule, when one is told to 
expect to find a promised acquaintance very clever, 
it is safe to prepare for a flippant and impudent 
ignoramus. This is more likely than not to be the 
case, and if it proves otherwise the surprise is by so 
much the more agreeable. If it is a lady who is 
thus spoken of, the alternative is generally between 
being dull and conceited, and being pert and con- 
ceited. But even the genuine possession of the 
qualities which are vaguely summed up in this 
word is notoriously no guarantee for the twenty 
other qualities, definable or not, which enter into 
the composition of a friend. 

There is a common trick of fancying that it is 
impossible for a man to find a new friend without 
being more or less inconstant to his old ones. And 
there is a certain kind of thin-natured people whose 
conduct lends countenance to such a notion — peo- 
ple who are ever ready to set up a new idol, ceas- 
ing at the same time to pay further deference to 
the idols whom they have set up previously. For 
instance, if you are arguing, they will almost os- 
tentatiously take the side of the new-comer against 
their former ally. If you are travelling together, 
they will seize any opportunity that offers of mak- 
ing friends with a stranger, and, in a manner, 
snubbing you in his favour. If their opinion is 



252 Studies in Conduct. 

sought to decide a dispute between you and some- 
body else, the chances are ten to one that their 
candid sense of justice will impel them to give 
their verdict against you. There are few of the 
petty basenesses of life for which so little excuse 
can be made, or which are so thoroughly hateful, 
as this practice of habitually deserting the old for 
the new, simply because it is new. 

But a shifty and disinterested parasitism may 
be left out of sight when we are talking about 
friendship, with which it has nothing in common 
except a measure of outward seeming. If caprice 
and a rooted habit of unfaithfulness are not to 
be fairly charged against everybody who now and 
again expands the circle of his friends, no more 
can it be admitted that " what makes us like new 
acquaintances is not so much our weariness of the 
old, or the mere pleasure of change, as spleen at 
not being sufficiently admired by those who know 
us too well, and the hope of being more admired 
by those who know us less." In this, as in every 
other maxim from the same source, there is a keen 
truthfulness, if we only look to the worse side of 
human nature. Confined to the people in whom 
this is the most powerful side, the aphorism is 
most likely as correct an account of motives as we 
can have. If we are talking of a man penetrated 
with vanity, or of any other man so far as he is 
vain, a new friend may mean to him only a fresh 



New Friends. 253 

admirer and flatterer. But if we look to the other 
side of human nature— to men and women, that 
is, in whom egotism has not ridden roughshod 
over all the different virtues which together confer 
on people the sense of there being a very extensive 
universe outside of themselves — it is easy to see 
that a love of admiration has nothing to do with a 
new friend. He is valued, not as a minister to 
our own self-love, but because he has something 
that commands our admiration and service. It 
may be said that this is only what ought to be, 
while Rochefoucauld represents what actually is. 
And we will confess that to anybody who says this 
there is no answer, only it may be added that no- 
body w r ho says it 'deserves any answer. In all the 
finest and truest friendships of which there is any 
record, the prime element has been some senti- 
ment more or less like reverence, and yet more or 
less distinct from it. It is reverence without dis- 
tance, consciousness of one's own partial inferio- 
rity without abasement, the tender fidelity of the 
votary without the mechanical deference of the pro- 
fessing disciple. The measures and proportions 
vary infinitely, still at bottom there always lies the 
conviction that your friend has some virtue or some 
grace of character which you are without, though 
not apathetic about. This may seem a hard say- 
ing, but only to those who confound friendship 
with familiarity, or with one of those half-accidental 



254 Studies in Conduct 

intimacies which are so often mistaken for friend- 
ship until an accident happens to reveal the blun- 
der. It is natural that, as life advances, the will- 
ingness to recognise the value of anything that 
we have missed should at all events not increase, 
because the opportunities of repairing the lack 
have practically vanished. But the later we can 
prolong that flexibility and openness of spirit which 
welcomes new friends without disparaging old ones, 
the more likely shall we be to postpone the draw- 
ing nigh of the evil days, and the years when men 
say there is no pleasure in them. 

Friendship between men and women is nearly 
always a growth of later life, for the obvious rea- 
son that in the earlier days of passion any amica- 
ble relation at all, except between brothers and sis- 
ters or those who have grown up from childhood 
together, is at all events strongly tinged with 
warmer hues than those of mere friendship. Yet, 
of all forms of the relation of which we have been 
talking, this is perhaps the most delightful. It is 
possible for a man to love his wife with due fer- 
vour, and still to find in some other woman the 
qualities which he seeks in a friend. The friend- 
ship between Madame Swetchine and De Tocque- 
ville was only one out of a score of scarcely less 
notable alliances of this pure and elevated kind, 
though curiously enough they are most of them to 
be found among illustrious French people. The 



New Friends. 255 

most charming of the Queen Anne essayists de- 
clares that " if you examine the bottom of your es- 
teem for a woman, you will find that you have a 
greater opinion of her beauty than anybody else." 
There is no harm in this pleasant delusion, if it be 
one ; but not even imaginary beauty is essential in 
such cases. It does not lie at the root of the mat- 
ter. The sort of woman whom a man makes his 
friend is, like Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, " masculine in 
a womanly way." When the grace, the vivacity, 
the keen power of taking interest, characteristic 
of all fine-natured women, are deepened by a cul- 
ture which unfortunately only a few women give 
themselves, a character is formed in which every 
vigorous-minded person may find all that is most 
delicious and most valuable in friendship. He is 
very lucky who has the chance of securing an 
influence of this sort ; and as such a chance, from 
the nature of things, seldom offers itself to a very 
young man or a very young woman, here, if no- 
where else, is a good reason why people should be 
slow to seal up the roll of their friends. 




XXVI. 



SINS AGAINST HEALTH, 




HERE are a good many reasons which 
may help to explain what is, at first 
sight, the extraordinary fact that 
bodily health is only just coming to 
take a first place among the objects of a reasonable 
man's interest. Of course the methods of heal- 
ing sickness have always attracted a large measure 
of attention, because downright sickness is dis- 
abling in a way that is too plain and irresistible to 
be overlooked. Everybody will do his best to get 
rid of pain when it is on him. But the con- 
ception of health as something much more than 
the mere absence of a prostrating or unmistak- 
ably disagreeable malady is considerably slower 
in making way. When somebody talked about 
health being " the state in which existence itself is 
felt to be an enjoyment, in which all simple and 



Sins against Health. 257 

natural pleasures are appreciated, and the little 
every-day anxieties of our business sit lightly upon 
us/' his definition seemed a mere commonplace 
truism. Nobody could reasonably maintain that 
health is anything short of this. But there are 
uncommonly few people who could pretend that, 
in practice, they make the attainment of this 
blessed state such an object as they unquestionably 
would if they fully realized its blessedness. Theo- 
retically, we pray for health as the best gift which 
the gods have to bestow 3 but when the matter is 
left in our own hands, there are a hundred other 
goods which we never hesitate about silently pre- 
ferring. 

It is rather startling to think how few persons 
one knows who do not habitually sacrifice health 
for some other advantage confessedly less worth 
having. And not the least startling thing is 
that the few who have the sense to make health 
really their first aim are not seldom the dullest 
blockheads in the choice of all other aims. At 
the Universities, for example, and among the best 
sets of young men in London and other large 
cities, the men of muscle are not commonly the 
men of brain. There are more exceptions than 
there used to be, it is true ; but the hard-reading 
man, as a rule, still too generally contents himself 
with that miserable and delusive form of exercise, 
a constitutional. London is supposed to be the 

s 



258 Studies in Conduct. 

centre of intellect, and if we wish for a measure of 
the space which thought for the body occupies 
among us, it may be found in the pitiful provision 
made for gymnastic exercises in the metropolis. 
With the exception of one or two comparatively 
small private establishments (and those expensive) 
and the German rooms, there is nothing. Half-a- 
dozen of such halls as that which Mr. Maclaren 
superintends at Oxford would make London a per- 
fect sanatorium for the hard -worked mortals who 
are compelled to live there the greater part of the 
year. It is a wonder that the idea has never oc- 
curred to one of those ingenious beings who make 
it their business to promote companies. If one 
or two fine gymnasiums, well fitted up, and with 
competent superintendents, were established in 
convenient situations, the shareholders could not 
fail to get a decent dividend, and they would earn 
the blessings of mankind into the bargain. The 
promoter may reasonably express his indifference 
to the latter, but, as leading to the former, they 
are not without their value. A gymnasium is 
neither the pleasantest nor the most effective form 
of taking exercise, but, unluckily, everybody can- 
not afford to keep a horse. The persistence with 
which doctors urge horse-exercise is, to the majo- 
rity, as absurd as the persistence with which they 
recommend plenty of old port or sound dry sherry, 
together with good living, to paupers. Those who 



Sins against Health. 259 

cannot ride mtist walk, as the saying is ; and those 
who find walking, for its own sake, very dull and 
mechanical, and in all respects the very reverse of 
refreshing, ought to be able to go to a gymnasium 
if this were really the best of all possible worlds. 

But the scantiness of gymnasiums is not the 
only symptom that men are more ready to talk 
than to act as if health were the prime good. 
Gymnastics are not the only form of exercise, and 
exercise is not the only condition — perhaps not in 
all respects the most important condition — of 
health. The way in which people eat and drink 
has as much as anything else to do with the sense 
of freedom and elasticity in all their faculties. 
The prevalent recklessness in this respect is amaz- 
ing beyond description. We dine at one hour one 
day, and another the next ; or we take a hearty 
meal immediately after rising from a hard day's 
work, or immediately before going to bed ; or, like 
Wellington when he dined with Cambaceres, we 
don't care what we eat, and take anything which 
a flippant- minded cook chooses to serve. As 
somebody has said, melted butter is the bane of 
English society, and melted butter is only a type 
of other popular poisons. There are persons, we 
believe, who eat pork. And an ingenious writer 
has recently suggested that people who cannot 
afford to give stylish dinner-parties should ask 
their friends to supper ; that is to say, you should 

s 2 



26o Studies in Conduct. 

ask your friend to take at nine or half-past a 
quantity of food which will not be digested much 
before two or three in the morning, and, if he goes 
to sleep meanwhile, will probably never be digested 
at all. Men, in other respects in their senses, 
have been heard to declare that they would as soon 
drink bad wine as good. There is no end to 
the barbarous eccentricities which we permit our- 
selves in the matter of diet. The spectacle of an 
ordinary dinner-party, with its admixture of rich 
meats and various wines, is a sufficiently familiar 
instance. And there are people who readily admit 
all about health being " that state in which exis- 
tence itself is felt to be an enjoyment, and the little 
anxieties of our businesses sit lightly upon us," 
and who value it accordingly in theory, and yet 
who are charmed with that most astounding in- 
vention of modern civilization, a fish-dinner at 
Greenwich or Blackwall. Mr. Herbert Spencer 
has said, and with obvious justice, that attention 
to health is a moral duty. It is a duty, too, which 
one finds an immediate reward in observing. The 
reward of being charitable or industrious is not, 
under all circumstances, direct and palpable ; but 
a man who abstains from what he knows will make 
him feel cloudy or uncomfortable, or prevent him 
from working as he wishes to do, gets his quid pro 
quo in a prompt and undeniable shape. 

Excessive brain-work is probably the side on 



Sins against Health. 261 

which some of the most useful men sin most reck- 
lessly. Exercise and regularity and care about 
food may counterbalance the mischief up to a cer- 
tain point, but the fuel can never be supplied with 
a rapidity and certainty proportionate to the con- 
sumption. The long lives of the judges are com- 
monly held up as a proof that the hardest work is 
not inconsistent with health. But it is worth while 
to consider that, though a judge works a good deal, 
it is not all work which taxes his mind very severe- 
ly. It is not like the work of an original author, 
for instance. The judge sits a great many hours 
of every year in a court, but his mind is not keenly 
on the stretch throughout the whole of every 
case, perhaps not even of the majority of cases. 
And, in the second place, a judge always has an 
enormously long rest once a year. The vacation 
is long enough to permit a thorough renovation, 
and this is the great thing. Every holiday is so 
far an advantage ; but there can be no doubt that 
one prolonged change of occupation and surround- 
ing is of a better kind than a number of short 
changes, not one of which is sufficient to allow the 
system entirely to recover. It is a mistake, there- 
fore, to argue from the example of the Bench that 
a man may work his brain eight or ten hours a 
day, most days in the year, without seriously im- 
pairing his health. Yet men of all sorts and 
conditions are constantly attempting this impos- 



263 Studies in Conduct. 

sible feat. Men of business and politicians and 
students and journalists all supply instances of the 
fatal sin of the time. It takes so long to rid the 
mind of an old habit of looking at things. 

And, as we began by saying, the idea that it is 
unworthy to care about the body has more than 
one root. First, there is the Puritanic misinter- 
pretation of the Gospel injunction that we are to 
take no heed for the body. For a being with an 
immortal spirit to save to trouble himself about 
its perishable case was thought preposterous. To 
feel any concern whether your skin is clean or foul, 
whether your muscles are braced or flaccid, whether 
your nerves are in good order, whether your lungs 
and heart play freely and healthily, all this has 
been deemed a sign of a carnal and worldly spirit. 
John Knox would perhaps have denounced a gym- 
nasium as bitterly as a mass-house. 

Then, among others whom theological conside- 
rations are not likely to influence, the spirit of 
philosophic asceticism has had weight. The body 
must be mortified and neglected, so that the un- 
derstanding may be clearer and more entirely 
disengaged. Just as the Puritan considered every 
moment given to the body as so much subtracted 
from the chances of the soul, the intellectual 
ascetic views every moment given to the body as 
so much reading and thinking and writing lost 
to the individual and the world. One of the 



Sins against Health. 263 

old students, like Bayle, for example, would have 
thought gymnastics or riding not a bit less frivo- 
lous than dancing minuets. And this ascetic 
spirit survives into unscholastic days. Not a few 
hide-bound old merchants would even now, in 
their hearts, place a gymnasium scarcely one de- 
gree above a casino. Lord Stanley's admission 
that at Liverpool many of the young clerks who 
use the gymnasium there " take to these exercises 
with an enthusiasm that is quite remarkable/' will 
be a good text for the pleasant persons who think 
that a clerk should go home at night and read 
Political Economy or the History of Commerce 
till bed-time. It is an immense comfort to think 
that this particular class of fools, at all events, is 
rapidly on the decrease. 

But then there are other influences at work 
which may create a force almost equally hostile to 
the rational view. The desire to be rich at all 
cost, or to be famous, or to rise to the top of a 
profession, is just as likely to make a man inatten- 
tive to the claims of his body as the old conviction 
that it is wicked to feel any concern about it. 
A politician recently declared that the man with 
a quick brain and an excitable nervous system, 
but with a feeble and badly-developed frame, is 
as unsatisfactory a result of anything pretending 
to be a system, as a navvy or a ploughman, who 
has run all to muscle and kept no brain. Wher- 



264 Studies in Conduct. 

ever there is room for deliberate choice— that is,, 
wherever a man is born with a fair constitution 
which foolish parents have not ruined — this is not 
at all too strong a judgment. And all growing 
opinion is in this direction. " If it were possible/' 
it has been said, " to trace the history of families 
in detail, we should be startled to find how many 
of those engaged in purely sedentary pursuits die 
out, and how the gaps have to be filled up, year 
after year, from the hardier rural population." 
The constant evidence of this, and of the other 
evils which can only be hinted at as resulting from 
continual sedentariness, will help and fit in with 
the wise philosophy which teaches that a human 
being should develope himself ail round ; and that 
anybody who neglects his bodily health is just as 
much shirking his moral obligations as if he took 
no care of his money or his intellect or anything 
else which can conduce to his happiness. For one 
reason, if for no other, a man is morally bound to 
seek vigorous health. A feeble and sickly father 
is most likely to have a feeble and sickly pro- 
geny; and, even if he likes being feeble himself, 
one cannot imagine anything more wicked than 
entailing, by carelessness and folly, the curse of 
ill-health on the next generation. 

And the same consideration may set people 
reflecting whether a gymnasium is not equally de- 
sirable for women. The increased health and 



Sins against Health. 265 

vigour of a woman who takes moderate and suit- 
able gymnastic exercise are well known to the 
gymnastic teachers who have had female pupils. 
Of course the notion is one at which fools grin. 
It is not familiar; and, with respect to ideas, it is 
novelty, and not familiarity, which breeds con- 
tempt. But it is not too much to say that three- 
fourths of the lethargy and weariness of which men 
complain in women, and of which women them- 
selves are much more bitterly sensible than men, 
are due to their entire abstention in a general way 
from anything like active exercise. Physiologists 
explain why this is the case. Family doctors 
harangue about it, and insist upon exercise. And 
the form in which their prescription is carried out 
is a lounge three or four times round the gardens 
of the Square. It is strongly to be hoped that, 
when women get their " rights/' the first use to 
which they put them will be to erect gymnasiums 
for themselves. Perhaps they might do it with 
advantage, even without waiting for their rights. 





XXVII. 

MIDDLE-CLASS MORALITY. 

ECENT transactions in the middle- 
class world furnish a striking and ex- 
ceedingly unpleasant comment upon 
l^£j that public morality of which the 
Briton talks so loudly and confidently. Take, for 
instance, those dishonourable conspiracies on the 
London Stock Exchange against the stock of a 
given bank or of a given railway company. Or 
take the conduct of those who are implicated in 
the London, Chatham, and Dover disclosures ; for 
though there may be a dispute as to the guilty 
persons, there is no dispute possible as to the fact 
that somebody or other has been tricky, menda- 
cious, and fraudulent. Or take the unpatriotic 
misdemeanours of the rich tradesmen, from Man- 
chester and elsewhere, who went about scattering 
the wages of their own and other people's corrup- 



Middle-Class Morality. 267 

tion in rotten boroughs. We can no longer settle 
all public iniquities by depositing them at the door 
of a bloated and effete aristocracy. And if we al- 
low ourselves to go on calling the middle-class the 
great backbone of the country — a position which 
is supposed to follow from the bloatedness of the 
aristocracy — it must at least be admitted that a 
good many of the vertebrae are in an uncommonly 
shaky and decayed condition. 

After all, the great pursuit of the English mid- 
dle-class is the search after money, and, next to 
this, the search after position. The average mem- 
ber of the middle-class first wants to be very rich, 
and then he wants to know lords. Traditional 
morality may keep men with these designs straight 
for a certain time, perhaps for a generation or so ; 
but at length the tradition grows weaker, while 
the desires have been growing stronger. There 
are, we know, plenty of people eager to be rich, 
who would not on any account soil their hands 
with shabby or questionable dealings in quest of 
riches. There are plenty of people, too, hungering 
and thirsting after an opportunity of getting a lord 
to dine with them, and yet who would not for the 
world cheat or swindle. That is, a man may be a 
flunkey and a snob without being a rogue as well. 
Only the tendency of one or two very strong and 
very mean desires is to produce a thoroughly mean 
character, and anything which wears away a man^s 



268 Studies in Conduct. 

self-respect at one point is most likely to infect it 
all round. The fact of seeking an elevated end 
disables one from having recourse to ignoble means. 
And, for the same reason, a man who is capable 
of habitually thinking of sordid and sorry ends is 
in a way to become capable of adopting unworthy 
and discreditable means to secure them. 

Moralists have talked a great deal of nonsense 
in their time, and when they enjoin upon us all 
the virtues that belong to contented poverty they 
teach what is absolutely mischievous as well as 
nonsensical. If nobody wanted to be rich, nobody 
in our present stage of society would be industrious 
or thrifty, nobody would employ labour, nobody 
would have any interest in acquiring skill, or in 
making the best of it when it was acquired. We 
should be content, as our remote ancestors were, 
with roots and nuts. The windy sentimentalists 
who rave against the fundamental postulate of po- 
litical economy forget all this. But the moralists 
are clearly right when they say that the tendency 
of the desire for riches, as an end in itself, is un- 
favourable to refinement or elevation of character. 
This is a commonplace which needs neither new 
proof nor fresh illustration. Still, like a hundred 
other commonplaces, it is allowed to rest on its 
laurels, and is placed in the dim and drowsy limbo 
of admitted truths. We concede without an argu- 
ment, in the first place, that the hunt after wealth 



Middle-Class Morality. 269 

tends to weaken character in certain very delicate 
and vital points ; and, in the next, that most mem- 
bers of the middle-class are engaging in this pe- 
rilous hunt with rapidly increasing activity. Yet 
everybody professes to be very much shocked and 
surprised when it appears from time to time that a 
great many of the leading men in commerce, the 
men who are types of what their neighbours are 
aspiring to be, pass through a hundred dirty bits 
of business in a twelvemonth, and think nothing 
the worse of themselves on this account. 

That people should be shocked at this is natural, 
because the traditions of a more honourable time 
still survive in sufficient strength to make disho- 
nourable conduct unpleasant in our nostrils. But 
the surprise is quite unjustifiable. How can you 
expect commerce of itself to be an education in 
refined and elevaced morality ? This kind of mo- 
rality is the product of one of two conditions — 
either of a profound and genuine religious senti- 
ment, or else of a high culture. Nobody, we be- 
lieve, would be disposed to go to the Exchange for 
either one or the other. There are cultivated men 
and religious men to be found there, very likely, 
but they are a tiny minority. The chief education 
of the commercial man is commerce itself. The 
young men who reach Manchester with two shil- 
lings and sixpence, and then in twenty years are 
rich enough to buy boroughs on strictly liberal and 



270 Studies in Conduct* 

patriotic principles — what culture can they have ? 
They may buy up all the pictures that they can 
lay their hands upon, and it is certainly very 
much better that they should buy pictures than 
that they should spend their money in buying 
voters. But pictures in big and staring frames 
do not make up culture. They make a fashionable 
and costly furniture for a room, like sideboards 
and mirrors, but they do not give the man who 
owns them ideas as to his social duty. A taste 
for handsome furniture is quite compatible with 
the easiest and loosest public morality in the world, 
with the most hopeless paucity of ideas, with the 
darkest ignorance of all that has been done and 
thought and felt in the great world of past and 
present that lies outside the Exchange doors. 

But the education of life, it is asked, is that to 
count for nothing ? Is it not far more wide, im- 
pressive, and enduring than any that can be got 
from dead printed pages? This attitude towards 
learning was the natural result of a just reaction 
against the tyranny of pedants and bookworms, 
but the time for assuming it has fully passed away. 
It is no longer necessary, in order to put down 
the despotism of professors, to maintain that buy- 
ing and selling, eating and drinking, manufactur- 
ing and higgling and haggling, constitute all the 
education in ideas that any reasonable man can de- 
sire, and that is good and wholesome for him. And 



Middle-Class Morality. 271 

the moment that the necessity for repressing arid 
schoolmasters had ceased/ such talk ought to cease 
also. We see every day what the education of life, 
ungrounded on other education, does for crowds of 
merchants and contractors and shopkeepers. Their 
contempt for ideas, being measured by their igno- 
rance of them, is enormous and profound. They 
look upon disinterestedness as the dream of senti- 
mental novelists. A man who would sacrifice a 
thousand a year for a theoretic principle is a fool 
who will justly end his days in the lunatic depart- 
ment of a workhouse. A poet is a person who 
writes for young ladies, and manufactures orna- 
ments for the drawing-room table. A painter is a 
person who manufactures ornaments for the dining- 
room walls. Historians, biographers, and essayists 
are over-rated and over-paid people who supple- 
ment the work of the cabinet-maker who supplied 
the bookcase. Is it wonderful that men for whom 
the education of life has done this should see no 
harm, but rather the reverse, in a sharp trick, in a 
clever misrepresentation, in the nearness of a shave 
against an indictable fraud? 

It need not be said that people may have the 
loftiest moral character without being the most 
cultivated intellectually. You may find an old 
Scotch peasant animated by all but the very high- 
est emotions, and filled with delicacy and eleva- 
tion and refinement. Still, this is mainly because 



272 Studies in Conduct, 

he is educated, and because the system of his coun- 
try makes him familiar with Hebrew history and 
morality and ideas. Looking at Scriptural train- 
ing apart from its strictly religious side, it gives a 
peasant, who has had a fair elementary education 
to begin with, poetry and philosophy and history 
all in one. The English trader is too often a great 
deal too busy making haste to be rich even to think 
of the history and philosophy and poetry which he 
may hear, and does hear, any Sunday before the 
sermon begins. Much less has he time or freedom 
of spirit for a search after ideas. And though, as 
we have just said, a man may have very high prin- 
ciples of conduct without much book-learning, this 
scarcely affects the fact which all experience teaches, 
that the highest conduct is the fruit of the charac- 
ter that has been most raised by wise intellectual 
culture. In the present conditions of English life, 
the inordinateness of the desire to make money, or 
to get on in some other mean way, makes more ir- 
reparable the divorce between the practical classes 
and theoretic teachings. Of course we are speak- 
ing of classes and tendencies, apart from remark- 
able and solitary exceptions in individual cases. 

Whence comes it, for instance, that the num- 
ber of students at Oxford and Cambridge remains 
comparatively stationary, while the wealth of the 
middle-classes has been increasing in such gigantic 
proportions ? The Universities themselves abound 



Middle-Class Morality. 273 

in defects and excesses, in sins of omission and sins 
of commission, and are capable of vast improve- 
ment in what they omit to teach, in what they do 
teach, and in the spirit in which they teach. But 
this alone is very far from accounting for the com- 
parative apathy with which the opulent middle- 
class regards University education. This apathy 
is only a type of their feeling towards all the 
higher education. It is said, indeed, that trades- 
men do not send their sons to college because col- 
lege training hinders the promotion of practical 
business habits. If this be so, the tradesmen must 
be great blockheads, or else they would scarcely 
overlook the numbers of cases in which an old firm 
has been lifted out of the rut and carried on to 
splendid prosperity by some son who has taken 
a double-first at Oxford, or been a wrangler at Cam- 
bridge. The real argument on which the trader 
relies in his own mind is that education means 
loss of time, and that loss of time means loss of 
money, and that this means loss of the one thing 
that is worth living for. The consequence of all 
this is a lowering of tone among the middle class, 
and an increased readiness to apply the maxim that 
all's fair in love and war to the getting of cash. 

An educated man may be a swindler, or may at 
least stoop to shabby and low transactions, but he 
is all the less likely to do this for being educated. 
People once argued against popular education that 



274 Studies in Conduct. 

it would make the offence of forgery easier, and 
therefore more common. They forget that it 
would make people less disposed to commit the 
offence, though it would make them cleverer at 
handwriting. A double-first classman might cheat 
a railway company, or join a Stock-Exchange con- 
spiracy, or bribe a voter ; but then he would per- 
haps have deliberately forged, or even committed 
a murder, if he had not been a double-first. We 
are not saying that all commercial people should 
go to Oxford, or that they would be elevated to 
perfection if they did. Only they ought to make 
education in principles and ideas the first thing, and 
the art of accumulating masses of cash the second. 
There is not much visible prospect of their doing 
this, and consequently there is every prospect of 
commercial shabbiness and dishonesty and unscru- 
pulousness increasing apace. The influence of the 
traditions of honour has been weakened, so has 
that of religious feeling, and neither has been ge- 
nerally replaced by anything better than a partial 
and fluctuating belief in the copy-book legend that 
honesty is the best policy, — honesty of course be- 
ing an elastic phrase, to be interpreted according 
to circumstances. Until culture has come in to 
fill the moral gap, the English middle-class will 
continue to supply more people with low aims than 
is good for its fame ; for people with low aims can 
scarcely be elevated in their choice of means. 



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XXVIII. 



LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS. 




ilN all states of society there has been a 
more or less wide gulf between the 
man of the world's theory of the 
right conduct of life, and that of the 
schoolmaster, the moralist, and the professor. It 
would be paying the latter class a compliment 
which they by no means deserve to say that the 
principles of happiness have advanced in propor- 
tion as this gulf has been narrowed by the en- 
croachments of the pedagogic spirit. The beset- 
ting sin of the moralist is contempt for flesh and 
blood, want of sympathy with all the elements of 
human nature ; and it is really a question whether 
his excessive exactions have not done more injury 
by revolting people, especially young people, than 
his precepts have done good by directing and en- 



276 Studies in Conduct. 

couraging them. For an intemperate and unsym- 
pathetic moral professor does harm in both direc- 
tions. Those of his hearers with whom he is most 
successful grow narrow, acrid, and hard. Those 
on whose minds he is able to exert least of the in- 
fluence to which he aspires rush off, by force of 
inevitable reaction, into unrestrained libertinism of 
one kind or another. 

Thus two extreme varieties of evil principle 
and practice are bred up, and thrown into the 
world to spread themselves. There is a right 
instinct in the general popularity of the scape- 
grace, as well as in the questionable affection 
commonly felt for the good boy. Although, on 
the other hand, the man of the world at his best 
is free from this unsympathetic temper which is 
the too common mark of the moral professor, he 
has very obvious faults of his own, and one above 
all others. Just as the moralist's characteristic de- 
fect is want of broad sympathy, so the man of the 
world's characteristic defect is want of elevation. 
The first makes no allowance for human weak- 
nesses, the other has no idea of human strength. 
The one is too ready to talk about falling, the 
other too slow to think of rising. The one thinks 
the world a great deal worse, and the other thinks 
it a great deal better, than it really is. But both 
the dogmatic moralist and the man of the world 
fall equally short of a just measure of the com- 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 2j~ 

plex tidal forces which underlie human actions 
and aspirations, and promote the ceaseless move- 
ment and growth of human character. Each is 
too contented with producing a smooth and pre- 
sentable surface of character in anybody whom 
they have to train, though of course the degree 
of presentableness is estimated by very different 
standards. 

Men of the world do not often take the trouble 
to write books about education. Literary compo- 
sition is too irksome, and its success too doubtful. 
As it happens, however, the famous Letters of 
Lord Chesterfield to his Son constitute to some 
extent a man of the world's manual of education 
and conduct. We say to some extent, because 
there is an altogether unreasonable insisting upon 
graces and airs and fine manners which does not 
represent the writer's notion of the space which 
these things should fill in education generally, but 
is due to the accident that this was the side on 
which young Stanhope was especially weak. The 
person to whom they were addressed was a boor. 
His address was awkward and uncouth, and he was 
too indifferent to the impression which he made 
on other people. His father therefore is never 
weary of expatiating on the importance of les 
manieres nobles, Vair noble, les graces. As Earl 
Stanhope says, " Had he found his son, on the 
contrary, a graceful but superficial trifler, his let- 



278 Studies in Conduct. 

ters would no doubt have urged with equal zeal 
how vain are all accomplishments when not sup- 
ported by sterling information." The writer him- 
self, it may be remembered, declares that he would 
only covet the epithet of well-bred next to that of 
Aristides. And though Chesterfield was no Aris- 
tides, he was no fop either. He was one of the 
two or three really wise and just viceroys whom 
England has given to Ireland, and he has the dis- 
tinction, along with Lord Macclesfield, of having 
rescued the English Calendar from the barbarous 
isolation and confusion of the Old Style. Chester- 
field was not a man of the world in the sense in 
which Major Pendennis was a man of the world. 
This is to say, he was really a man of the world, 
and not a man about town — a very important dis- 
tinction which the latter usually overlooks. 

^he worldly success which he proclaimed as the 
prime end of existence was, so far as it went, suc- 
cess of the best kind. It was not that sort of suc- 
cess which culminates in the accumulation of a great 
fortune, or in getting a seat or a promotion in the 
House of Peers, or in forcing yourself into the 
most exclusive set in London society. It was 
something much better than all these, because it 
required a greater amount than they require of 
those qualities whose exercise and development 
conduce most to happiness. Chesterfield's scheme 
of life omitted many of these qualities, but he ap- 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 279 

pealed to a much finer set of motives than if he 
had made wealth the end of life, or mere social 
distinction at dinner-parties and routs. " To make 
a figure" was his untechnical phrase for the aim 
which he recommended his son to place before him- 
self. The distinction w T hich was thus held up meant 
political power and popularity as much as it meant 
any one thing. And the difficulty of the condi- 
tions of attaining it is never blinked. Prodigious 
and untiring industry, minute attention under 
all circumstances, the most vigilant and univer- 
sal conciliatoriness, a generous ambition, — these 
are among the requirements of a large sort of 
worldly success, and Chesterfield never tires of en- 
joining them. 

That ferocious and famous epigram as to the two 
characters whose manners and morals respectively 
the Letters inculcate, has blinded people to the 
self-denial and diligence which would have to be 
practised by the Chesterfieldian disciple. Because 
he said that of the two he would rather have his 
son a fop than a sloven, it has been argued, with 
odd logic, that Chesterfield valued fopperies more 
than solid qualities of character. Yet every other 
letter contains an .injunction not to be a smatterer. 
" Go to originals whenever you can, and trust to 
copies and descriptions as little as possible." The 
little intervals of otherwise idle time are to be oc- 
cupied by taking up " Bayle's, Moreri's, and other 



280 Studies in Conduct. 

dictionaries," and the example is actually recom- 
mended of a gentleman who got through the whole 
of the Latin poets in moments which the most as- 
siduous might fairly leave unoccupied, and which 
modern delicacy forbids us to describe. " Whatever 
you do, do it to the purpose ; do it thoroughly, not 
superficially ; approfondissez : go to the bottom of 
things." 

With the incurious temper that stares instead of 
examining, Chesterfield had no patience. He in- 
sists that his son shall never tire of asking ques- 
tions about everything that he sees. If it is a 
court of justice, he is earnestly desired to acquaint 
himself with its jurisdiction ; and if it is a college 
or an academy, with its rules, its members, and its 
endowments, and not merely with the dimensions 
of the respective edifices. If he sees a regiment, 
he must learn all about the number of its troops 
and companies and officers ; who provide pay and 
clothing, the mode of recruiting, and so on. Writ- 
ing to young Stanhope in Paris, he asks, " If you 
go to les Invalides do you content yourself with 
seeing the building, the hall where three or four 
hundred cripples dine, and the galleries where they 
lie? or do you inform yourself qf the numbers, the 
conditions of their admission, their allowance, the 
value and nature of the fund by which the whole 
is supported ? This latter I call seeing, the former 
is only staring/ 5 And, again, he says that " many 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 281 

people take the opportunity of les vacances to go 
and see the empty rooms where the several Cham- 
bers of the Parliament did sit, which rooms are 
exceedingly like all other large rooms; when yon 
go there let it be when they are full ; see and hear 
what is doing in them ; learn their respective con- 
stitutions, jurisdictions, objects, and methods of 
proceeding ; hear some causes tried in every one 
of the different Chambers." And then comes the 
often repeated, " Approfondissez les choses" No- 
thing stirs up Chesterfield's contempt more pro- 
foundly than the silly shallow generalizations which 
coxcombs, in his day as in our own, wished to 
pass off for wit and philosophy combined. He 
more than once w r arns his son against " the false 
wit and cold raillery" which these foolish preten- 
ders indulge in about religion, marriage, and most 
other institutions held in common respect. If he 
had been giving advice to a man reading for a 
double-first or a wranglership, he could not have 
spoken more practically or sensibly than when he 
warned him against haste and hurry. " A man of 
sense takes the time necessary for doing the thing 
he is about well, and his haste to dispatch a busi- 
ness only appears by the continuity of his applica- 
tion to it ; he pursues it with a cool steadiness, and 
finishes it before he begins any other." Of course, 
like much of what is best in Chesterfield, this is 
commonplace, but it is more so now than it was 



282 Studies in Conduct. 

then, and at any time it is really good commonplace. 
It represents the man of the world on his best and 
most useful side. 

Some of what he says on points of purely intel- 
lectual culture would scarcely be said by a man of 
equivalent mental size at the present day. When 
he recommends his son to study history, he is very 
careful to explain that he does not mean "the 
jimcrack natural history of fossils, minerals, plants, 
etc., but the useful political and constitutional his- 
tory of Europe for these last three-and-a-half cen- 
turies." The same disrespect as that in which he 
holds such jimcrack sciences as botany and geology 
he has also for music — or " piping and fiddling," 
as he habitually styles it— which he considers an 
illiberal pleasure. Sculpture and painting he re- 
commends as connected with history and poetry ; 
but piping and fiddling " are connected with no- 
thing that I know of but bad company." " If 
you love music, pay fiddlers to play to you; but 
I insist upon your neither piping nor fiddling 
yourself." 

At first this seems simplya mark of the eighteenth 
century, but one can scarcely say this on reflecting 
how very generally it is still thought effeminate for 
a man to play the piano. So extremely stupid a 
notion is, we fear, an English peculiarity, just as it 
is a peculiarity of schoolboys to believe that poetry 
is a thing only fit for girls. Chesterfield on poetry 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 283 

is still more unlike what the same sort of man 
would say in the present century than Chesterfield 
on music. Some of his criticism on Homer is very 
funny indeed. He expresses his aversion to the 
" porter-like language" of the heroes, and he de- 
clares that " Homer's hero, Achilles, was both a 
brute and a scoundrel, and consequently an im- 
proper character for the hero of an epic poem ; he 
had so little regard for his country, that he would 
not act in defence of it, because he had quarrelled 
with Agamemnon about a mistress ; and then after- 
wards, animated by private resentment only, he 
went about killing people basely, I will call it, be- 
cause he knew himself invulnerable; and yet, in- 
vulnerable as he was, he wore the strongest armour 
in the world • which I humbly apprehend to be a 
blunder, for a horse-shoe clapped to his vulnerable 
heel would have been sufficient." This delicate 
appreciation and fine poetic sense was natural in a 
man who could not for the life of him make out 
why poets and orators should not be as great under 
a despotism as in a free State. 

Still the creatures who think themselves Ches- 
terfields because they despise books and ideas, and 
behave impudently and conceitedly in society, are 
a long way from the mark. There is an admirable 
lesson alike for full blockheads and for empty block- 
heads in the Letters. Their fundamental doctrine 
is that " a man who cannot join business and plea- 



284 Studies in Conduct. 

sure is either a formal coxcomb in the one, or a 
sensual beast in the other/' and, considering the 
tendency of character of any sort to run to ex- 
tremes, this is a lesson which can hardly be too 
often repeated and impressed. It is the stress 
which he lays on the importance of steering a just 
middle course between pedantry and foppery which 
makes Chesterfield's Letters so right, where vo- 
lumes of precepts for the manufacture of prigs, 
like Todd's i Student's Manual' for example, are so 
exceedingly wrong and unwise. 

It would be superfluous to dwell at length on 
the immorality of the Letters, both because this is 
the aspect on which everybody has fastened too 
exclusively, and because the surface immorality of 
the book is not its worst trait. There is a certain 
grossness which shocks the more fastidious delicacy 
of this age, in the way in which the father, with 
something of a snigger, almost enjoins upon his 
son the practice of a gentlemanly gallantry with 
any of the ladies of his acquaintance, as well as in 
the perseverance with which he points out that 
coarser forms of vice are objectionable on grounds 
quite distinct from the fact that they are coarse 
or vicious or anti-social or degrading. Many pro- 
foundly enlightened observers of modern life, how- 
ever, are strongly of opinion that a father does 
more injury by a careless reticence with his son, 
than Chesterfield could do by his too frank recog- 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 285 

nition of the perils which beset youth in this direc- 
tion. Few fathers could endure, as Chesterfield 
did, to banter a lad of nineteen about his eternal 
passion which might last three months; but it may 
be admitted that the reserve and stiffness which 
prevents so many fathers from making their sons 
their friends is the source of deep mischief which 
might be avoided by the opposite course. Tn other 
parts of the book, there is no sort of excuse to be 
made for Chesterfield, and the only wonder is that 
his shrewdness and common sense did not supply 
the place of high integrity. When, for example, 
to take a well-known instance, he encloses to his 
boy a letter with directions that the boy is to copy 
it and forward the copy as his own composition, so 
that the person to whom it was addressed might 
admire his elegance and style, the curious thing is 
that Chesterfield should not have felt that deceit- 
fulness of this sort was sure to recoil upon himself. 
He reaped the fruit of the seed which he had thus 
sown, twenty-one years after this vile trick, when 
he found out, on his son's death, that he had for 
some years been concealing with much art and in- 
dustry the fact that he was married and had two 
children. On mere Chesterfieldian principles, he 
ought to have seen that to teach a boy deceitful 
and disingenuous arts is worse than a crime ; it is 
a blunder. 

Not a few precepts of this kind in the art of 



a8<5 Studies in Conduct, 

petty deception are of a kind which many persons, 
who would not be at all too virtuous to wish their 
sons to practise them, would still be too virtuous 
deliberately to write down and enjoin. There is, 
for example, " the innocent piece of art— that of 
flattering people behind their backs in the presence 
of those who, to make their own court, much more 
than for your sake, will not fail to repeat and even 
amplify the praise to the party concerned." There 
is some truth, again, in the proposition that "a 
steady assurance with seeming modesty is possibly 
the most useful qualification that a man can have 
in every part of his life." But we feel it to be a 
truth not wholesome for a lad, or for anybody else 
with an unformed character. This is the case with 
many of the apophthegms for which Chesterfield 
has been most blamed. They are true, and they 
are worth saying, but they are out of their right 
place in letters on education. Rochefoucauld' s 
Maxims are an excellent account of the conduct of 
selfish people, and of all people so far as they are 
selfish. Still, no boy would be the better, but the 
worse, for reading them, on the same grounds on 
which Socrates, in the ( Republic/ is made to object 
to the use of the poets in education. And Ches- 
terfield is bad reading for immature minds for the 
same reasons. 

There is a superficial shrewdness, for instance, 
in saying that " women who are either indispu- 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 28 



tably beautiful or indisputably ugly are best flat- 
tered upon the score of their understandings, but 
those who are in a state of mediocrity are best 
flattered on their beauty, or at least their graces; 
for every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks 
herself handsome, but, not hearing often that she 
is so, is the more grateful and the more obliged to 
the few who tell her so; whereas a decided and 
conscious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to 
her beauty only as her due, but wants to shine 
and to be considered on the side of her under- 
standing; and a woman who is ugly enough to 
know that she is so, knows that she has nothing 
left for it but her understanding, which is con- 
sequently (and probably in more senses than one) 
her weak side." Though flippant enough,, this is 
not unentertaining to a man or woman who has 
seen life, but it was addressed to a boy sixteen 
years old. 

" Take out the immorality," said Johnson of 
Chesterfield's Letters, "■ and the book should be 
put into the hands of every young gentleman." But 
after you have taken out all that Johnson meant by 
immorality, what remains turns too exclusively on 
the littleness and meanness of the world to be salu- 
tary for a " young" gentleman. It was Johnson's 
own robust grasp of the better part of human nature 
which made him such a shining moral light in 
Chesterfield's very dingy age ; and it was his sym- 



288 Studies in Conduct. 

pathy, implied in the saying we have quoted, with 
the actual and existing society which Chesterfield 
had in view, that redeemed him from the dull op- 
pressive pedantry of most moralists. He could 
relish his "frisk" with Beauclerk and Langton, 
and yet see that virtue is a much higher thing 
than vice can be, much more likely to bring hap- 
piness, and far more conformable therefore to 
reason and the law of right living. Chesterfield 
hed no respect whatever for virtue, either in 
the modern sense or in the sense of a man like 
Johnson, and this is fatal to the worth of his Let- 
ters for the purpose for which they were written. 
Unless a young gentleman is much more firmly 
set in virtuous principle than young gentlemen 
usually are, the Letters are not likely to do him 
any good. 

Chesterfield's fundamental fault is that of the 
man of the world in most times. He missed see- 
ing that the important thing about a man, and the 
one aim of those who instruct him wisely in his 
youth, is his character. In other words, he thought 
more of seeming than of being, of reputation than 
of reality, of outside success than of internal ele- 
vation and calm. The Aristotelian virtue of High- 
mindedness had no place in his list of desirable 
qualities. No doubt he would not have thought 
any the worse of a man for acting invariably from 
eminently lofty and upright motives, and in this 



Lord Chesterfield's Letters. 289 

respect even he was better than the man of the 
world of the inferior stamp. But he never could 
have regarded the consciousness of integrity and 
purity and high-mindedness as anything like an 
end in itself. Take the love of justice, for instance — 
an idea which it is perhaps the chief merit of the 
eighteenth century to have developed in greater 
perfection than had been possible at any other 
epoch, at least of modern times. Chesterfield 
would have sought the reputation of being just; 
he would have tried to do justice, because this is 
a virtue which promotes happiness, in a popula- 
tion, say, like that of Ireland, where one race and 
sect, both before and since Chesterfield's time, has 
oppressed a hostile race and sect. But probably 
he never thought of justice at all in its ennobling 
effect on the character of the just man. Like 
much greater and more famous philosophers than 
himself, he would have made the standard of jus- 
tice its single motive. He could scarcely have 
realized to himself the notion of a man acting 
justly, without a deliberate and foreseeing eye 
to the effects of his just actions on the world out- 
side. That one should pursue justice, as he pur- 
sues bodily health, simply and solely with a view 
to his own comfort and well-being, is an idea for 
which there could have been very little room in 
Chesterfield's mind. Here the professed and dog- 
matic moralist has the better of him, for he does 

u 



290 Studies in Conduct. 

generally profess the doctrine that virtue is its 
own reward. Only you never can get the moralist 
to believe that virtue is subtle and many-shaped^ 
and resides in a thousand unsuspected spots ; and 
that there are proportionate and fitting rewards 
for each and all of its forms. 



<Kf> THE END. 4§W 



J. E. TAYLOR AND CO., PRINTERS, 
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S IMN FIELDS. 



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